WITH houses scrubbed, resolutions made and tall, dark strangers met, it always feels good to put the excesses of the festive period to bed on January 1. There are, after all, only so many chocolate-laced breakfasts, alcohol-soaked lunches and movie-filled afternoons a person can take.

But one thing that will be harder to say goodbye to this year is the parliamentary-recess induced break in the Brexit obsession that has allowed other events to filter through to our collective consciousness. Not that much of the news making the festive headlines was especially good. Indeed, from US President Donald Trump shutting down his government in a bid to secure billions for his deeply divisive border wall to a tsunami that claimed hundreds of lives in Indonesia and the administration of big-name high street retailer HMV, much of the news was decidedly bad.

Yet with anything even remotely Brexit related sucking up inordinate amounts of airtime in the run up to Christmas (think Jeremy Corbyn and the did he/didn’t he stupid woman debacle), the parliamentary recess has at least created the space for other events to receive a share of the public’s attention.

Take the failure of Californian technology business Kaiam. Having established a base in Livingston as a result of its 2013 acquisition of optical network developer Gemfire, the company went into administration just a few days before Christmas, leading to the loss of over 300 highly skilled jobs in the West Lothian town.

Though many businesses failed over the course of 2018, this one remained in the news for days because, with Brexit sniping held at bay, it happened at just the right moment for political capital to be made of it.

Indeed, because Scottish Government development agency Scottish Enterprise had previously awarded Kaiam a grant of £850,000 to help it move production from China to Scotland, Labour MSP Neil Findlay ensured the story was kept alive by demanding an inquiry be launched into how the SNP has gone about handing such grants out.

He may or may not have a point. While on the one hand it is, of course, vital that we all know that taxpayer money is being sensibly spent, on the other it seems obvious that an enterprise agency will by definition back early-stage and scale-up businesses that stand a high chance of failure.

That Kaiam did fail – and, worse still, that it did so at Christmastime – is a disaster for its staff and their families. But with no such fuss being kicked up when the Scottish Government’s investment in FanDuel was wiped out in a mid-2018 boardroom coup, or when £1.2 million of UK Government funding was lost when Highland construction business Carbon Dynamic went bust earlier in December, surely the wider issue is that such events are only allowed to become Big News when there is nothing more eye-catching on the agenda.

Back in 2001 Labour aide Jo Moore got into serious bother when she cack-handedly made exactly that point by telling government colleagues that September 11th would be “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”. Though she was rightly vilified and later lost her job, Ms Moore got one thing right: when a seismic event occurs little - if any - attention is spared for anything else.

Now the festivities are over and the Year of Brexit is finally upon us, we can be sure that from the point parliament returns next week normal Brexit-obsessed service will resume. With so much else on the agenda, though, we must not allow other news to get buried as a result.

For Scotland in particular, where constitutional wrangling has been de rigueur for the best part of six years, too much has already been allowed to slip, with targets for closing the educational attainment gap for poorer children, improving the performance of the health service and eradicating homelessness all being missed. While such shortcomings would be impossible for any administration to hide from for long, other matters have already been pushed into the long grass, with the likelihood that justice system reforms such as the transfer of employment tribunal powers from Westminster to Holyrood will be quietly shelved looking ever more possible. With Scotland’s much-anticipated new benefits system already running into teething problems while the ability to provide a promised increase to free nursery education by 2020 is looking less and less likely, the SNP must be thanking its lucky stars there is a constitutional crisis at Westminster for it to hide its failings behind.

The UK’s fast-approaching departure from the European Union promises to be seismic in the extreme, meaning the first three months of this year – if not the whole year itself – present the perfect opportunity for any government, public body or business to commit their bad news to the ground. With even the biggest of news likely to become small by default, 2019 is shaping up to be the year in which we must sweat even the smallest of small stuff.