It is not all gloom, here are my reasons to be cheerful in Scotland

I laughed. “I try, I really do, but bloody hell, there’s not much to be cheery about,” I said, reeling off a list long enough to depress even the most optimistic soul. “But I will try…” I promised. So this is for you Isabel, and everyone who may be feeling a bit deflated after the Christmas celebrations and the prospect of the year that lies ahead - reasons to be cheerful, part four (RTBC4). Old punks will get the reference. For the rest of you, Ian Dury & The Blockheads had a hit with Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part Three in 1981. Even with unemployment at 9.3 per cent, inflation at 11.9 per cent and Margaret Thatcher in Number 10, we still found things to smile about in the days before cat memes and Vinted bargains.

Top of my RTBC4 list must be that Christmas is over for another year. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t identify as Mrs Grinch. I love festive fun as much as the next person, but there are only so many Roses an average person (one not on Mounjaro) can eat before throwing up. I am one purple choc away from being sick. And what on earth has Cadburys done to the Roses wrappers? Christmas demands the shiniest foil wrappers, not paper parcels in shades of dull.

As for French fizz, I just can’t anymore. Bulk buying Crémant de Loire because it was on offer for a week in the middle of December seemed a good idea at the time, but now the mere sound of a cork popping triggers my acid reflux. So, let’s hear it for the enforced abstinence of January. A few bracing walks in the freezing rain and all will be well in the world and my gullet. Until I log on to check my credit card account.

Live music is another of my RTBC4, and no-one does live better than Bruce Springsteen, who at 76 has more charisma and raw talent in his right pinkie than any Tik Tok star a quarter his age. I was lucky enough to see him twice this year, in Manchester and then Liverpool. I chose the ‘wrong’ night of course to be at Anfield, so missed Paul McCartney joining him on stage to sing Can’t Buy Me Love. However, screaming, “We gotta get out while we’re young ‘cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” with thousands of other old age pensioners is gloriously cathartic. So thank you, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen, for every earth-stopping, death-defying, legendary moment. He may not have plans for a UK tour in 2026, but I have tickets for the next best thing - Elvis Costello, whose Radio Soul tour promises a selection of his early songs. 1981 was a Good Year for the Roses, and 2026 promises to be one too.

Phoning up a buddy was one of Ian Dury’s reasons be cheerful. He was right, good friends, old and new, really are something to sing about. This is where I start to well up, so feel free to skip this bit, though I'd rather you didn’t. In recent years, I have found myself enveloped by a group of women from across the UK and beyond. Many I have known for decades, some I only met three years ago, others I have still to meet in real life, but will. Rich women. Women struggling to get by on universal credit. Powerful women. Women who live their life unobtrusively. Young women with decades before them. Older women grabbing every moment of life because we know that one day, sooner than we like, it will be too late. We found each other through the movement to protect women’s rights, born out of necessity, but we have built something much bigger than a short-life campaign. We have created a sisterhood, powered by righteous anger, suffused with solidarity. It is more potent than any political party and more effective too.

This new sisterhood, in all its rumbustious glory, is the 21st century manifestation of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s. Fifty years ago on Monday, the sisters won a momentous victory when the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts came into force on 29 December 1975. On the same day, the equal opportunities commission (EOC) was established in Manchester. Progress, but only up to a point, as Celia Brayfield, one of the women who campaigned for change, recalls in a recent article by feminist writer Susanna Rustin. She said: “We really did set out to change our society and to make life better for our daughters but it’s a fight you have to keep winning. There’s never any sitting back and saying ‘we’ve won’ because you never have.”

Too right. Today, women look on aghast as the current minister for Women and Equalities, Bridget Phillipson, refuses to sign off the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on April’s binding Supreme Court judgement on sex. She is worried, it seems, that banning men who ‘identify’ as female from women’s toilets would also imply that women could not take their infant sons into a single sex space. I cannot begin to speculate why Phillipson seems determined to betray the legacy of women like Celia Brayfield whose shoulders she stands on, but as we look towards 2026, I remain resolutely cheerful.

Earlier this month, I looked into the determined blue eyes of Sandie Peggie, the nurse who has sacrificed her career and her family's privacy to stand up for a woman’s right to say no to a man, and I knew that we would prevail. Bracing January walks. Dancing in the dark. Sandie Peggie, For Women Scotland, all the women who won't wheesht. Reasons to be cheerful, part four.