This Christmas it’s different! I’m actually looking forward to it for the first time in aeons.

I even acquiesced to one of Her Ladyship’s usual five Christmas trees being erected in the front room in what could fairly be described as mid-November.

My creaking old car, which happily still has a CD player, roars out Carols from Kings on every journey from the Helensburgh hinterland into the metropolis, and the Christmas tape, and yes it is an actual tape, bellows out a concoction of Christmas choons around the house from my bachelor ghetto blaster.

I promise you, I am usually ‘bah humbug’ about the whole thing until the morning of Christmas Eve. How I handle Hogmanay is a trope for another day, but Christmas? Bring it on!

Not only am I happy about the forthcoming festivities, I have been sufficiently well organised for a change to have bought my A4 diary in plenty of time and look forward to populating it with the big events of 2024. Therefore I’m now relishing next Christmas as well!

You’ll be pleased to know that at last I have been able to coordinate the calendars of my myriad email accounts and can now get them all on my phone.

This depends, of course, not just on the wi-fi but the prevailing wind and how many seagulls are on the hull of the sugar boat at the time.

But still, despite finally dragging myself into the 21st century, nothing beats sitting down at my desk, leaning on my blotting pad and writing entries in a paper diary with a fountain pen.

I use a fountain pen because for the life of me I can’t find a quill in Wright’s Home Hardware, or anywhere else for that matter.

But there’s a knock. A downside. Ordinarily I seek out shops and buy my goods and chattels therein, eschewing hideous self service tills because they’re doing someone out of a job.

I especially like the supermarket at Rosneath because nary a scanner exists and I deal with a human.

And while I usually dig in my heels and rage against any machine which tries to tell me what to do, and if you cut me I bleed thrawn, this year I have made every single Christmas purchase from my phone, and largely in the bath.

What can you do? Am I slowly but irretrievably shrugging off my troglodyte status? Am I a Renaissance man – if a little late? Is this (yet another) midlife crisis?

First of all I’m looking forward to Christmas, then accepting the digital diary, now this.

If you see me reaching for the controller to watch Mrs Brown’s Boys then please send help, for I truly need it.