Pretty much everything you'll find online tells you it's nigh on impossible to have a happy commute, but as I was sat on the DLR a couple of weeks ago and the sun was streaming in through the window, with a view of the Olympic stadium in the distance, I realised that I was actually enjoying my journey to work. OK, I don't commute in regularly these days, but for five years I travelled into London from leafy Hertfordshire spending two hours of my day on a train.

Last June I wrote a blog called How a Pessimist became Practically Positive and I thought you might be interested to hear if I've managed to remain optimistic. I'm sorry to say that my Happy Rambles have fallen by the wayside, more down to a lack of time than a lack of interest, but I do try to take a few moments each evening to think about what I'm grateful for, so all is not lost.

Last week we gave you five ways to make January brilliant and we hope they've helped you have a positive start to the year. How are you feeling? Better or worse than last week? Can't see the end of January, or feeling closer to the spring? In the process of bringing them to you we realised that there are actually many other ways, so we thought we'd share a few more.

So the festive season is over for another year, the children are back at school and there's a whole year stretching ahead of us before we get to do all that fun Christmas stuff again. Depressing isn't it? In fact, Monday was apparently the most depressing day of the year. But it doesn't have to be that way. We thought we'd give you some tips by sharing five ways you can make your January brilliant instead of blue.