The Roman god Janus is about to play his annual trick on us. 31 December, the last day of the year, will be followed by 1 January, the first day of the year. We’ve ended up right back where we started. Frustrating, but at the same time reassuring.

Janus, after whom the new month is named, was always pictured with two faces, one looking forward, the other back. He is the god of both beginnings and endings. The notion of returning to 1 January has always bothered me slightly, as though all that effort last year was for naught. Indeed the fact that each day of the year is a ‘copy’ of all the equivalent days in previous years seems troublesome too. It’s the only reason we can have birthdays, of course, and wedding anniversaries and Halloween and all the rest – but still, a little groundhoggy.

I like the idea of numbering the days that pass, with the number always going up. Start it whenever you like, maybe backdating it to year zero in the calendar we use now, although that risks igniting the old debate about why there wasn’t a year zero, why it went straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. But wherever we start, each day would have a different number. Say you’d been born on day 685,374, and it was now 703,281, you would have a sense of how much life you’d lived. A lifetime of 80 years is just under 30,000........

© The Spectator