In the lull between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day there is more to do than consume turkey soup, turkey curry and turkey sandwiches.

You can look over the year just past and decide on your goals for the next one, whether it’s finally mastering that sport, building that extension, learning that language or writing that novel.

In short, you can start preparing for the next 12 months. I have already come up with my new year’s resolutions. To save time, I make the same ones every year.

What will 2020 bring?

Something else that comes when a new year approaches is to consider what significant anniversaries it brings. So far I haven’t been able to think of any for 2020, and yet the last few have been full of them.

In 2017 it was the centenary of the Russian Revolution and in 2018 it was 100 years since the end of World War One and votes for women. It was also 70 years since the foundation of this country’s greatest institution, the National Health Service.

In 2019 we had 80 years since the outbreak of World War Two, 50 years since humans first walked on the moon and 30 years since the Berlin Wall came down.

The only anniversary I know of that 2020 brings is that it’s 10 years since I bought a house.

I was a first-time buyer and the whole process was such a time-consuming, expensive and bureaucratic nightmare that at the end of it I decided I was also a last-time buyer.

But I was very fortunate to be able to join the mortgaged classes. House prices in Carlisle are far more sensible than they are anywhere else I’ve lived, and made it possible to buy for the first time. Inheritances from both sets of grandparents allowed me to put down a deposit. I had always rented before, and it became clear that mortgage repayments would be a lot less than the rent I was paying for a one-bedroom flat.

It’s one of those injustices of the modern world that everyone seems to accept. Models and TV presenters get paid more than doctors and nurses. And the least well-off have to pay more for their housing than the better-off.

My house is no mansion. It has two rooms plus a kitchen downstairs and two rooms plus a bathroom upstairs, and easily big enough for a single person or a couple without children.

The one-bed flat was warm, clean and handy to work, but there wasn’t enough space to swing a cat – though I never actually checked. I could probably swing a cat in my current front room. Maybe I will.

I don’t want them in my garden.

Joy of birdwatching:

For one of my discoveries in the days since buying a house is the joy of birdwatching. Like the house the garden isn’t large, though my days of playing football in one are over. Yet it attracts plenty of bird life, until a cat appears when they all scatter in fear.

It took a while for the birds to become regular visitors. My mum has long encouraged birds to her garden, with bird baths, bird boxes, seeds and squirrel-proof feeders, and so I got some tips from her. I bought the same seed she did, but there was very little interest in them.

So she advised niger seeds, which are particular favourites of goldfinches. I didn’t see a single one. Neither the goldfinches nor anything else seemed to give a monkey’s.

Peanuts started well but after about a third of them were eaten they were abandoned. The birds seemed very ungrateful and I was rather hurt. Maybe Cumbrian birds are just fussier eaters than Northern Irish ones, I told myself. Fat balls were a last resort. And I was pleased to discover that the birds went for them with great enthusiasm.

I have a bird feeder with room for four of them at a time and it needs refilled most weeks – not that it’s a problem. A bucket of 50 cost £5, so they work out at 10p each.

Dunnocks, jackdaws and others I can’t identify are particular voracious eaters of fat balls, and blackbirds are secondary customers. When some birds are at the fat balls a blackbird struts about underneath, picking up crumbs from them.

Once I saw a male blackbird feeding crumbs he had picked up to a female blackbird, their beaks together as if they were kissing. It looked quite romantic.

At this time of year birds need to eat their own body weight to survive, so it’s worth feeding them if you can. Fat balls seem popular.

Watching garden birds can be just as compelling as watching television.