Well, here we are, hurtling towards 2019 and you’re probably sitting there trying to concoct some half-baked New Year’s resolution; you know, that joyless process during which you lock yourself into a self-imposed prison of abstinence, think of something that you enjoy doing and vow to stop doing it because all those tut-tutting, healthy-living zealots and killjoys insist you are doing too much of it.

One of the diarist’s colleagues mentioned to me the other day that in order to usher in 2019 with a sprightly, fresh-faced, flab-reducing sense of purpose, I should do something that gets me out of breath a couple of times a day. That clearly means I’m going to have to start smoking.

Oh well, a new year, a new start and all that. In the sixth tier of English football, meanwhile, there’s a new sponsorship tie-in that’s caused a bigger stooshie than giving up booze for January.

Northumberland-based Blyth Spartans, who play in the National League North, have agreed an unlikely commercial partnership with Visit North Korea, a travel company which organises packages to the secretive Asian state.

Pyongyang? It sounds like something you’d hear a regular in the Blyth Miners’ Welfare club say after a few Newcastle Broon Ales.

On New Year’s Day, North Korean leader and eccentrically coiffured oddball, Kim Jong Un, will deliver his annual address to the nation.

Amid thousands of words of dreary, propaganda-laden prose, he will presumably rouse the communist zeal of the masses by informing the populace that Spartans have an important encounter with Spennymoor Town on the same day . . . and that testing of ballistic missiles will be shifted to the club’s Croft Park ground.

North Korea remains an isolated, secretive place and for the intrepid who venture there, it feels like they have landed on another planet.

It’s not quite as big a shock to the system as Blyth, mind you . . .

*Having stated in the build-up to this year’s Ryder Cup that he would get a tattoo on his rear end if Europe overcame the USA in Paris, team skipper Thomas Bjorn stuck to his word this week and finally got the winning scoreline etched into his buttocks.

Apparently, Nick Faldo was pondering something similar in 2008 but his egocentric captaincy was such a shambles, he simply ended up getting a self-portrait of an a*** inked into his own a***.

*Camille Herron broke the women’s world record for endurance running when she covered 162.9 miles in 24 hours.

And the secret to that success? “I walked a couple of laps while I ate Taco Bell and drank beer,” she said before adding of the race: “There was a lot of drama unfolding, people were stopping and puking.”

It sounds like the Taco Bell on Sauchiehall Street after last orders . . .

*What was the worst thing about PE at school? That’s right. Forgetting your plimsolls and having to do the cross country in your dress shoes.

Spare a thought then for the assistant referee at the Tranmere versus Morecambe match on Boxing Day who forgot his boots and ran the line in a smart pair of polished shoon.

The diarist is looking forward to John Beaton refereeing Rangers and Celtic tomorrow in his baffies.

*With the January transfer window set to creak open in the next couple of days, prompting the kind of lavish spending you’d get when Warren Buffett nips into the bookies, the diarist likes to hark back to the pearls of fishy wisdom spouted by former Swansea boss, Carlos Carvalhal, as he mulled over his modest budget.

“We have money for sardines and I’m thinking lobster,” said the Portuguese. “I will do my best to try and bring in the best players. I will look to the lobsters and sea bass, but if not we must buy sardines. But sometimes the sardines can win games.”

Here in Scotland, there will no doubt be a few pilchards purchased in the panic.

*On this December date in 1925, the celebrated American golf-course designer, Pete Dye, was born.

One of Dye’s creations was the Stadium Course at Sawgrass, host to The Players’ Championship.

Commenting on the Stadium Course’s various challenges and quirks, one withering observer suggested that it was “90-per-cent horse manure, 10-per-cent luck”. A bit like an Old Firm game then?

When the Sawgrass high-heid yins tore down the old clubhouse and replaced it with a grandiose edifice which trampled subtlety into the ground, one PGA official gazed at the structure and uttered the immortal line, “This gives us instant tradition.”