IT may have been a whole week ago, but my new year got off to a baffling start when I watched “Sherlock” on TV, and started doubting my own existence.

I hope you had a delightful Christmas, and that 2016 is off to a great start for you. 

Congratulations if you’ve already successfully finished all that cheese.

Having viewed the BBC’s most-watched festive edition of Sherlock on the very first day of the year, I now have a rather odd problem - I’m not sure if I actually did watch it, or in fact just dreamed I did.

Maybe I’m still dreaming that I’m thinking about whether I dreamt it or not.

If I’m making no sense at all (probably a regular problem for you), then perhaps I’d better rewind a little an attempt to explain why I’m so confused. This may not go well, as I’ve pretty much no idea myself.

The modern re-imagining of the Conan Doyle detective, Sherlock Holmes, sees a very current version of the sleuth deducing all manner of marvels from clues invisible to the regular man-on-the-street.

The new year special saw the pipe-sucking genius attempting to solve the mystery of how a murderous bride carried out her rampage whilst apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. All fine and weirdly dandy, except for the fact that Holmes & Watson were wandering around a 1890s landscape.

It later transpired that all of this was, in fact, a drug-induced dream, in which our tetchy hero was attempting to solve a vintage case in his ‘Mind Palace’.

I had an experience like that once myself, when I overdosed on Lemsip and imagined I was dating both Sheena Easton and Kylie Minogue at the same time. 

Coming down from a cold-cure high can be a terribly depressing experience.

Anyway, this plot-twist was an interesting one, but shortly after that point my brain waved it’s white flag, as the Victorian Sherlock started describing to Watson what the future looked like. 

Following that, I think there was some stuff which involved a dream within the dream, but by that time my

grey matter was gently rocking itself back and forth in a corner of my skull whilst humming a pretty tune repeatedly.

Having discovered, by chance, that some people in my local cafe were relieved to hear that they weren’t alone in their Sherlock struggles, it transpired that some Twitter-chums were also suffering from Holmes-related bemusement.

On the plus side, being unsure if everything is real or not does mean that I may actually be dreaming all this, and I’m actually a Lottery-winning playboy enjoying a quick snooze to recover from a particularly heavy champagne and Aston Martin-purchasing session in my mansion.

The alternative is that I have yet again been out-foxed by a TV show before the year was even 24 hours old, and I have a scrumpy problem and a Mitsubishi with creaky suspension.

Pass the Lemsip.