Two dates give January 2028 its character beyond the holiday. Self-assessment tax returns filed online, together with any tax owed for the year that ended the previous April, are due by the 31st, and Burns Night on the 25th is marked across Scotland and well beyond it. The RSPB's garden bird count falls in the last weekend of the month, which is about as much as anyone wants to do outdoors by then.
Take the weekends out of the 31 days of January 2028 and subtract New Year's Day, and what remains is the working-day count shown above. Scotland comes out one day lower again because of 2 January, which is the first of several points in the year where the four nations of the United Kingdom simply do not agree on how many working days a month contains.
The turn from January into February closes the tax deadline that dominates the second half of the month and lets the calendar breathe. What follows is a month with no bank holiday anywhere in the United Kingdom, a week of half term somewhere in the middle of it, and the first snowdrops in sheltered ground.