Asked by my wife how we should spend the day in the immediate aftermath of a rather hectic Christmas schedule I responded with an inspired idea. What should we do today? Nothing!

Nothing was my idea for the day’s schedule. It went down very well. The idea had clearly never really occurred to her.

It was as if I had invented a brand-new concept.

The scales seemed to fall from her eyes and gradually but surely she began beaming.

Yes. Yes! I could see the idea spreading throughout her frame.

In the end she was positively aglow with the notion.

So taken was she that she ended up looking like the old Ready-Brek adverts on TV.

Now truly alive to the idea that we could fill the day without doing anything, she was fulsome in her praise for my inspiration.

And offered a compliment which I’m not sure I was hundred per cent pleased to hear.

“Yes, you’re very good at that,” she said with genuine impressed sincerity.

And followed it up with another intended compliment. “And you’re very good at encouraging others to do that too.”

I’m not sure I was altogether flattered at being identified as Colchester’s king of complete inertia but sometimes it takes a person from outside of your own sphere to recognise what your talents really are.

After due contemplation I began to think that maybe she was on to something.

Of all the various activities and occupations I get myself involved in, my work, the arts centre, parenting, charity fundraising even the gardening, what really shines out, what I really excel at, is doing nothing.

And not only that, I have an untapped and unusual ability to inspire nothingness in others too.

There is of course a rich tradition of the concept of nothing in art and literature.

In Act One of Shakespeare’s profound tragedy King Lear, Lear warns his daughter Cordelia, when she refuses to declare her love for him, that “Nothing will come of nothing”.

Yet by the end of the play she’s minted! Although also dead. Which admittedly puts a bit of a damper on any spending spree she might have had planned.

Samuel Beckett wrote an entire play, Waiting for Godot, in which nothing happens. Two characters just sit around waiting for some bloke who never turns up.

And the American sitcom Seinfeld is based on the entire premise of a show about nothing.

Perhaps, with the right guy in charge, an inspirational and charismatic champion, the idea of nothing could be translated into a national movement.

I could spearhead a force for nothing. An activist for inactivity.

Writing the manifesto certainly wouldn’t present much of a challenge.

I envisage a very slim document. As in a few blank pages of nothing. Ditto our aims and objectives.

We could fend off all the questions about policy, what are you going to do about this, what are you going to do about that, with literally a one word answer to everything. Nothing.

The more I thought about it, the more the possibilities occurred to me. Climate change, population control, oceanic pollution, all the big things, all the global issues of our time could be cured if we adopted the one simple policy of my movement.

Starting with maybe me just setting up a Facebook group or something but quickly mushrooming into an international movement, I would be heralded a universal hero of our time and feted across the palaces of the western world. And beyond.

Yes, I see it now. She’s definitely on to something. Definitely. Put it on the to-do list.

It’s a winner. This isn’t just some flimsy New Year’s Resolution. This is an unstoppable international movement.

If I ever get round to it. First of all there’s some serious days of doing nothing to get on with. Happy New Year.