One of the odd things about deciding that you're going to start organising your life the middle of the year is that you end up with a July-to-June wall planner. Very useful, and it comes with lots of stickers (that we don't really use, but I like them) and a felt-tip pen, and it's possible to see the year filling up with stuff ahead of one, sort of like rural lanes emerging from the dark into the glare of the headlamps, on a midnight headlong cross-country rush sort of thing.

But of course Christmas and New Year are in the middle, which creates an odd effect, a bit like seeing a map that has (for example) Japan in the middle, and Europe off to one side and the US to the other, and one can see an entirely different world. A year that's lived as-it-were from Summer Solstice to Summer Solstice is different from one lived from Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice. For a start I used to emerge bewildered from Christmas and it would take half of January for me to orient myself, but now, having the month planned, I come back more quickly. On the other hand July is a bit confused.

And when they're filled up, they're quite tough to get rid of, as there's a map of the past year, and it would be like throwing the year away. Whereas with an old diary you can chuck it in the back of a drawer and forget about it, that's more difficult with a bit of A1 laminated paper.

I think it would be quite tricky to jump back to normal year planners - I'd either have to leave half a year unplanned, which is unthinkable, or only use half of a planner before jumping to the other planner, which would be wasteful and slightly cruel to the spurned planner. So it looks like I'm a July-to-June man for the time being.