New Year celebrations? Pass me a lump of coal
IT’S all over now, bar the shouting. Over the next few days, the decorations will come down, the children return to school and normal service will resume in homes and workplaces across the country. We’ll stop wishing each other ‘happy new year’ and inquiring about the progress of Christmas, while for many of us, the less said about New Year’s Eve, the better. If you ask me, it’s the sting in the tail of the festive season – an ordeal that must be endured with gritted teeth for the sake of social convention.
By the time it comes around, I’ve already eaten, drunk and made merry. I have no desire to prolong the party, particularly one that takes place in an atmosphere of forced jollity and is tinged with sadness, not to mention the ridiculous burden of making resolutions that could be made at any time.
While Christmas comes, it brings with it gifts of conviviality, good cheer and leisure. But New Year’s Eve with its strange mix of expectation, hype and mawkish sentimentality is the equivalent of a lump of coal. It’s nothing like in the movies where it’s often a backdrop to a character’s coming to terms with the past or embarking on a bright new future.
Bridget Jones met Mark Darcy at his mother’s turkey curry buffet. But thirtysomething singletons are never in real life that hard up for entertainment. The Christmas special for Downton Abbey was criticised for its multiple happy-ever-after storylines.
But the most improbable aspect was the stoic resignation with which the upstairs/downstairs folk rang in the New Year, singing Auld Lang Syne with the sort of clear-eyed composure you’d normally see at a memorial service.
NOW I have never ushered in a New Year in that dignified manner and I have seen my fair share. I have teetered through the urine-soaked mean streets, into restaurants that are crushed, overpriced and serving bad food. I have visited my local hostelry filled with braying hordes who never seem to go out except that night of the year. I have watched scenes of chaos and hysteria unfold as people who have drunk far too much see their high hopes for a great night out collapse before them. The extra security on the late night Dart service last Thursday says it all really.
Jennifer Lawrence, pictured, hit the nail on the head when she said that she always ended up on New Year’s Eve feeling ‘drunk and disappointed’. Her remarks were like a catalyst for others to nail the myth about New Year’s Eve being a celebration. Soapstar Jacqueline Jossa of EastEnders confessed to never having a good time, adding that she usually lost her friends in the melée and ended up counting down the seconds on her own. Our own Lucy Kennedy agreed that after the Christmas blowout, the New Year is a let down.
Even spending it among family and friends is fraught. The elderly turn mournful contemplating the turn of another year while children become fractious staying up past their bedtime. The television is terribly dated. Aside from Jools Holland, it’s wall-towall light ‘entertainment’ shows fronted by party-hatted personalities gamely trying to wring some humour out of some forgotten hasbeen or an up-and-coming star.
The only sensible course of action is ignoring the damn thing and not bothering even to open your hall door to symbolically usher in the New Year. Who dreamt up that as a wheeze for stay-at-home types to mark the occasion?
The New Year crawls in anyway, whether we spray Dom P at one another or are fast asleep. Happy New Year, belatedly.
Gay Byrne may not consider himself the daddy of the nation but the outpouring of concern at his recent heart attack may convince him otherwise.
There are few public figures who could provoke that reaction right in the middle of the festive season, as he well knows. He is 81 now but let’s hope he has many more years left to both enjoy life and give us the benefit of his wisdom.