Welcome to the first day of the new year - or is it?

For more than 1,200 years the people of the British Isles sensibly celebrated the start of a new calendar year on March 25, bringing together the regeneration of the growing season with the Christian festival of Easter that celebrates the triumph of life over death.

All that time we followed the Julian Calendar, the creation of Julius Caesar, which placed the winter at the end of the calendar year, not at the very beginning.

The Julian Calendar, based on the cycles of the moon, was slightly out of kilter with the solar year - 11 minutes and 14 seconds to be exact. As time passed the difference accumulated until after 1,000 years it measured eight full days.

In the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII decided the time had come to do something about the measurement of man-made time. To take account of the extra days he decreed that every year divisible by four should be a leap year (366 days instead of the usual 365) - except the years beginning the centuries which only get the extra day when evenly divisible by 400.

Having sorted that out, Pope Gregory also decided that New Year should be celebrated on January 1. Of course in Mediterranean Italy the weather is very different to Northern Europe where January is hell on earth - more like the end of things than the beginning.

Most of Roman Catholic Europe adopted Pope Gregory's 'adjustment' in 1582. But in England, where the State in the shape of Henry VIII had severed links with Rome in 1534 when Henry made himself head of the Church of England, the Julian Calendar remained in place.

England remained out of step with Europe, at least those countries that were Catholic, for more than 200 years and during that time grew to be the most powerful and commercially prosperous nation on earth.

The fateful decision by the House of Commons in 1752 (the Whig Henry Pelham was Prime Minister) to align with Western Europe landed us with the state of affairs we have had for the past 250 years, celebrating the start of the new year at a time when life is frozen in darkness and death and everybody feels at their lowest ebb.

This would remain essentially the same if even Tony Blair's Government was to take the radical step of abandoning the Gregorian Calendar for a modified version of the Julian, says Dr Philip Lewis, the Bishop of Bradford's adviser.

"You'd still have to cope with January and February, the depth of the blues in the winter season, if March 25 was the start of the new year. That's why you have the Christmas festival at the end of December, to brighten up a dreary period," he said.

True, but at least there would be no pretence of newness. January and February are merely extensions of December, fallow months, even though climate change has led to the early blooming of snowdrops and crocuses in Lister Park and other places. The real bridge to spring and a sense of starting anew is March.

Starting the new year at the end of March would at least align the calendar year with the financial year, which starts in April, and re-establish the link between the solar year of the seasons with the Christian festival of Easter which marks Christ's conquest of death.

Don't tell me there is no qualitative difference in mood between now and March. Spring is either here or just around the corner. The clocks go forward and the nights grow lighter by an hour. Because there is more light and things are visibly growing again people feel new hope to sustain them against the inevitable disappointments ahead.

"In the past dates were not as important as they are now: people paid their rent on Michaelmass or did something else on Candlemass Day," commented John Allison, membership secretary of the district's oldest local history group, the Bradford Historical and Antiquary Society (founded 1878).

"The world was then divided up into time zones, starting at Greenwich; but towns and cities had their own time. That lasted until the railways with people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Hudson. Time then became standardised throughout the country to fit in with railway timetables," he added.

Most peoples celebrate the new year on dates that have some significance for their native religion.

Rosh Hashanah, the orthodox Jewish new year, falls in September or October. Hindus in different parts of India celebrate the new year on various dates. The Sikh new year starts on April 13 or 14. The Muslim new year, Al-Hirja, is a moveable feast as it is related to the lunar cycle.

About three times a century this phenomenon allows Muslims to celebrate two new years during one year of the Gregorian Calendar.

Time, therefore, is not singular and indivisible. As a man-made creation there are many forms of time. For example, the Angles and Saxons of Northern Europe had a week of five days - Tuesday to Saturday. They imported this into England round about 400 AD.

Blessed condition. Imagine, life with no boring Sundays or dreary Mondays. Christian missionaries who set forth from Rome to convert the heathen brought with them the curse of those two days and the seven-day week.

The political radicals who ran the French Revolution from 1793 abolished the concept of weeks altogether.

The revolutionary calendar, organised into four groups of three months, was based on the seasons. The new year started in autumn and culminated in summer. Each month was divided into three decades, each of ten days duration.

This system also had new names for the months - Vendemiaire for September, Fructidor for August - and lasted until Napoleon re-established the Gregorian Calendar in 1806.

The last word belongs to John Allison. "Having New Year in spring would be better for celebrating. Let the Scots have their Hogmanay and we'll have ours when the nights are lighter and warmer," he chuckled.