If you’re anything like me, you make absolutely no plans whatsoever for New Year’s Eve thinking that it’s too far ahead in the future to be worrying about. You wonder why everyone else is in such a flap; it’s only 29th December for God’s sake! And from there you glide on, under a quietly confident delusion that something will turn up. Inevitably things DO turn up, but in a pique of miserliness you end up declining them all, because they involve buying extortionately priced advance entry tickets, meals in the same price range as filling your own bath to the brim with caviar and Taxi journeys with fares that at any other time of the year would be enough to finance a journey to and from Adis Abababa. Or at least they would be, only the last available cab was booked way back in the summer of 2004, and now the only option is to make a three-way investment purchase with Gary and Wayne on the nearest available property located 8 miles away from the proposed gathering, which you’d have to traipse back to at 3 in the morning, whilst carrying both Wayne and Gary on your back because they’ve over-indulged on vol-au-vents filled with vodka and have lost the use of their own legs. And such offers always come in a cruel game-show style format. Upon invitation your friends suddenly take the form of “The Banker” off Deal or No Deal and you’ll have to make a decision on the spot there and then, otherwise the tickets will sell out and your chance will have passed. But you let it pass and keep twisting, hoping that another friend will invite you to something affordable, but then you realise you’re 31 and that the remainder of your contemporaries now have families of their own now and they will be watching Jools Holland and sipping Baileys in the glow of loving domestic warmth, not caring in the slightest whether they leave you to watch Jools Holland alone in the warmth of a paltry rattling fan-heater, which operates so noisily it blocks out the warbling sound of Paloma Faith performing her latest chart-smasher (possibly being the only virtue of your desolate and sorry night).
So are you anything like me, then? Of course you’re not. I know this to be true as this year I found my level, and you weren’t there with me. I very much doubt the people I happened to spend this New Year’s Eve with are the type of people who’d read this blog. In fact I very much doubt they’d even know what a “blog” was. And should they be forced to hazard a guess, they’d probably assume it to be a particularly messy and unpleasant bowel disorder. I was in my local you see, with about thirty or forty other people. Needless to say I was the youngest there, probably by about 30 years. Not that I’m getting all ageist about it. Despite the generational ravine, fundamentally we all shared something in common; we’d all apparently kind of “given up” on celebrating the passing of another year. Possibly this was for different reasons, but I suspect that with wearying age, the perpetual novelty of forced seasonal bonhomie had worn thin. Why be financially extravagant when you can suffer yet another crushing annual anticlimax more cheaply in the local boozer? My attendance implied I must be ahead of my years, leaving me to conclude that spiritually, I must either be very wise or very broken.
I am not criticizing the clientele and I’m not criticizing the pub either. The effort the landlord had gone to easily out-weighed that of his custom, having provided 2 party poppers on each table and putting on a karaoke (which may sound modest, but remember there had been no admission fee, so he had literally provided this out of his own pocket). But the whole evening had a strange ambience, akin to that of an autumnal off-season club-house on a caravan holiday park. Rather than seasonal party hits, even the karaoke choices were weirdly weary. Not out and out depressing as such. It was more the sort of music that amalgamated a sense of crushed melancholy with a kind of ‘lighters-aloft’ hope. You know - the type of stuff that would not seem out of place if Comic Relief used it to soundtrack heart-rendering footage of starving Ethiopian children.
I didn’t quite last until the New Year, opting to leave the pub at around 11.45. The last thing I recall was gazing at some decorations draped from the ceiling, pondering whether or not there would be enough hold in a line of tinsel with which to hang myself with, if I so choose. Or maybe it was seeing some old chap standing up to deliver a rendition of “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother”, and having to stop myself pulling out my bank card and making a charitable pledge. Either way, I was home just in time to see the London New Year fireworks display from my television screen. I remember thinking, this time last year I was watching those firework displays from London itself. Admittedly it was on the telly in a mate’s flat because we couldn’t face the nightmare of the tube. But still, it was much closer to the pulse of philanthropy than I am now. Back then I had the prospect of a new job, a new life. And one year on, it would appear the only development seems to be the recede of my hairline. It is rather alarming to realise you have done little but drift through another year-long funk.
But thankfully New Year is a time of reflection. Another chance to consider ambitions and to review life in terms of the positive changes one can make. Of course, there’s every chance we’ll just spend another year repeating the same old behaviours, mistakes and all, like some lab rat pushing levers without will. But I guess the important thing about New Year is that it seems an appropriate time to allow ourselves the indulgence of contemplation. And you don’t need a plush night out to be able to do that.
