January can be a bleak month at the best of times. With the anticipation and excitement of the Christmas period giving way to the hangovers and credit card bills of the new year, the darkness and coldness of the weather reflects the mood of a period which can feel as far away from the good times as it is possible to get.

In this bizarre age, it has the potential to be worse than ever. With many having stoically answered the call in denying themselves their annual festive link-up with friends and family in the greater good, the subsequent news of the return of full-scale lockdown until at least the end of this month seemed to add insult to injury, amplifying the effect of the regular January blues. People who were already struggling with feelings of isolation must now spend the longest of months cooped up at their windows, watching the frost melt on a deserted world.

For those of us whose list of loved ones includes a Scottish Premiership football club, we do at least have a bumper fixture card to keep us company in a calendar slot normally occupied only by mid-season training camps in the Middle East (back in the days when such things were not highly questionable and irresponsible undertakings). However, while the diversion is welcome, it may serve to heighten the sense of otherness and exclusion in those suffering from intolerable loneliness.

In better times, these would have been matches attracting above-average crowds as groups of football buddies, returning from all corners to their places of origin, get together to revisit their old stomping grounds. Though the games themselves rarely satisfy the filtered nostalgia of unrelenting thrill, the experience of the event in enriching in itself. So to be presented with the unignorable reality that those stands, which ought to be ringing to the cheers of absent friends, now lie empty is a ninety minute-long reminder that the house in which we are watching is too.

All of us, no doubt, will know people who, as a result of these extreme circumstances, are finding difficulty in coping with a lack of human interaction, and not only those most obvious situations of lone living. Some will be missing the routines which offer their day a structure whose foundational necessity goes unnoticed to the external eye; some will be nursing the hidden heartbreak of watching tiny children grow up deprived of the love of an extended family and the socialisation of a community; others perhaps will spend their days trying to mute their brains’ computations of the financial distress brought by the curtailment of earning possibilities. Maybe there is someone you simply haven’t heard from in an unusually long while, or a long-lost acquaintance who has reached out with a superficially banal message, either of which can be an indicator of more below the surface.

In ordinary times, we are all guilty of failing to give enough support to those people in our lives. Hands up. Life goes too quickly to fit in everything we wish we could do, and such acts of social charity are easy to overlook. But now, more than ever, they are of inordinate importance, for what is a few minutes out of your day might be the only thing which makes someone else’s worth living.

So as the electricity of your weekend football fix gives way to the blackness of a long, long night, please take a moment to scan your contacts list and see if anyone really needs to hear your voice. You may never know it, but it may be the most important thing you ever do.

Scottish Cup Third Round Draw