A Cup of Kindness

It's New Year's Eve tomorrow. I hate New Year more than I hate Christmas. It's just a number, after all – there is no real evidence to say that January 1st actually exists except in the minds of Western people. Why should any more significance be attached to some random date in the darkness of winter, than it should to any other day of the year? Okay, so for the purposes of administration it is reasonably useful to begin somewhere – and I suppose that January 1st is as useful a place to start as any – but why attach such high emotions (and expectations) to what is essentially nothing more than a bureaucratic necessity?

'Happy New Year' and all that crap – why? Why do ardent young men spring proposals upon their simpering girlfriends at this particular time? Why do we make resolutions to change our wretched lives on New Year's Day when we could make those decisions at any other time of the year? Why do we find it necessary to throw parties, wear fancy-dress, crack open the champagne, or awkwardly cross-link our hands with our neighbours and sing 'Auld Lang Syne' (when we don't even know the words)? What's it all about?

I can't remember a single New Year's Eve that didn't end in disappointment. I usually find myself wanting to go home, or go to bed, at about 10:30 p.m., yet I know that I can't because I am duty bound – as a member of Western society – to stay the course until that final and fateful countdown: Ten...Nine...Eight...Seven... etc. Yawn, yawn, I say. And the fireworks – don't get me started... I hate the fireworks.

So, tomorrow evening I am planning to have a cup of cocoa and take a good book to bed by 11:00 p.m. That's what I'm planning – but I suspect that it won't happen. I suspect that I'll get dragged into some hideously unrealistic and artificially forced celebration of the coming of 2009 and will probably find myself snogging some random individual (when neither of us would give each other the time of day throughout the rest of the year) just as Big Ben chimes his usual mournful harbinger of new promise. It was ever thus....