ADVERTISER columnist Ruth Wishart looks forward - with mixed feelings - to the month which always seems to feel like the longest of the year...

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J is for January, the month where more people lie to themselves than any other month of the year.

Many thousands sign up for gym memberships, having promised themselves they will emerge, chrysalis-like, in the spring, fitter, trimmer, and detoxified.

This is very good business indeed for the fitness industry, whose gyms hoover up those 75 per cent of financial pledges belonging to people who crash off the programme by week three.

That is also the week when those who gamely stick to the plan find that whilst bat wing arms may or not re-emerge as reasonably taut biceps, the impact on the information taunting them from their bathroom scales is minimal.

J is for January, when the impulse to post all manner of resolutions is dwarfed only by the number of those turned to ashes by the Ides of March. But many people do manage to keep very important promises.

Those who finally release themselves from the tyranny of tobacco will find instant rewards in more stamina, more money, fewer coughs, and substantially less time standing outside pubs in driving rain chatting miserably to folks with whom all they have in common is a particularly virulent form of addiction.

(I speak as a former addict, as you can tell. Always holier than the thou still in the grip of the multi national drug pedlars.)

Plus they will be nicer to know, their clothes will stop smelling like unkempt ashtrays, and more people will enjoy kissing them. Results all round, really.

J is for January, when relatively new secretaries of myriad organisations will find to their alarm that you can’t – really can’t – organise a decent Burns Supper in a fortnight.

That any speaker worth his or her salt will have been booked many months before, and that any guests you really would like to come have almost certainly made other arrangements. It is probably not too late for those pair sowels to start planning for January 2018, however. If they get a bloody move on.

J is for January, when a very particular form of madness collectively strikes football clubs up and down the land.

Top, bottom, or middle of their leagues, they will convince themselves - if not their financial backers - that all they need is a new striker/centre-back/midfield maestro added to the player pool, and they will henceforth be nailed-on favourites to win the league/get into European football/avoid being kicked downstairs.

All of them are completely deluded. It will, however, take many millions of dosh they can’t afford to prove this point beyond reasonable doubt.

J is for January, when Glasgow will prove again that if you put on a festival with top notch talent, in good venues, cleverly programmed, then the punters will turn up in droves to the annual miracle of Celtic Connections - whatever the weather.

What else will bring cheer to the first month of their New Year after all?

But J is rarely for Joy, when Christmas is past and the holidays six long months away.