New Year – Getting On

I’m never quite certain what it is, exactly, that we are meant to celebrate on New Year’s Eve and who it was, exactly, that got to decide that the first of January should be the day on which we celebrate it. Is it perhaps conceivable that a bunch of no-hope Bronze Age serfs, having hauled numerous huge rectangular boulders across half of this country to Wiltshire, might have eventually realised that the planetary calendar they wished to chart was, itself, somewhat lighter than the giant slabs of quartz they had been dragging about, shouldered their load and said ‘Sod it, we’ll just leave ‘em here. Drop ‘em in some sort of circle lads, so it looks neat, it might be a while before anybody thinks to clear them away.’ And to those who said, ‘But what about the astronomical calendar?’ replied ‘Er, see that big bluish number over there. Well, when the Sun rises in line with that, it’s the start of a new year. A year? Oh, that’s what passes until the next one comes along… Here, have a bowl of fermented something or other and a neat little tray of pig’s entrails to chew on. It will become a tradition.’ Probably not. I don’t know who invented the year but, if I’m honest, if I had to guess, I would say the ancient Chinese or Egyptians – if it had been up to us, it would almost certainly have started at some other time to everybody else.

I can understand how early humans would have been able to work out the yearly cycle from the stars, the moon, the crops, the birds and the bees, and the annual demand for money from the tax man, but how did they decide where one year was to end and another begin? Surely they could have chosen the shortest day, or the longest day or at least something that could be recognised without a calendar: the day that next door gave the kids their annual nitting and bath; the day that the one with the lumps on her chest started mysteriously filling out and craving mammoth again… By whatever means, it has to be clear that the actual choice was an arbitrary one. It could have been any one of the 365.25 days that mark the Earth’s passage around the sun. If you ask me, it would have made a lot more sense to have chosen a day when far fewer people had a hangover.

It is, anyway, a strange thing to celebrate, don’t you think: everything is another year older, another day closer to death, including the Sun, which as far as I understand it¹, is just biding its time until it gets its chance to swallow the Earth during its death throes. It’s a fairly vindictive thing to do, but it seems to be just the way it is with stars… Maybe New Year’s Day is the Sun’s birthday… or God’s, or Time’s – that would make more sense wouldn’t it? That would be a better reason for letting the fireworks off. You wouldn’t feel quite so daft sitting on some dateline beach, waiting for the New Year Sun to rise if you knew that it was its birthday. What could be a better choice for New Year than the birthday of Time itself?

You wouldn’t mind hugging a stranger if you knew it was the anniversary of the almighty’s birth², although, as always, God’s a tricky one. It’s hard to see how he can have a birthday when he’s been around forever. (Ever wondered what he got up to before he decided to create the Universe? You can’t help but thinking that with all that Eternity to mull things over, he might have arranged things in a more logical manner: thought things through a little more. Mind you, if we’re created in his image, then he must be just like us, in which case, it’s a miracle that we’re not in an even bigger mess than we are.) Astronomers would have you believe that they know exactly how old the Sun is – even when, like the rest of us, they can’t work out when the car’s MOT is due – but try asking them for a precise date. To the nearest one million years does not help when you’re trying to book a party at the play barn.

Philosophers say that Time is a manmade construct, well, fair enough I say, but who was this man and what did the rest of us do to wile away the days before he did it? Presumably nobody got older until he sorted that one out. Mind you, you’d have to question how we all got here: a nine month pregnancy could be a very long time indeed if nobody had bothered to invent Time beforehand.
“You’re looking a little bit… erm… rotund these days, Shirley.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve been pregnant now for…”
“‘For’ what?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been pregnant since… Since… Been a funny sort of day hasn’t it?”
“Day?”
It’s almost impossible to imagine a life without Time – mostly because you wouldn’t have the time to do it³. At least it makes some sort of sense for us: if humankind created Time, then it must have a birthday and it is only right that we celebrate it. If we keep it happy, then it might stop slipping away quite so quickly. It is the one thing that none of us wants less of.

And that, of course, is the only real significance of New Year’s Day – as a tangible reminder that Time is drifting away and, if we’re honest, we realise that there is nothing we can do about it, other than light up a cigar, pour a giant glass of single malt and stare up at the stars: there’s nothing like a sense of your own insignificance to set you up for the year ahead. Just tell your family that you love them and stagger on to the horizon…

And a Happy New Year to one and all.

¹Not very

²Terminal embarrassment is really not so bad as long as it occurs on New Year’s Eve

³If you wish to experience eternity, simply watch an entire episode of Casualty in the company of an insurance salesman.

N.B. This piece was originally to be called Auld Lang Syne, until I realised I’d originally used that title in December 2018, so Old Times it became because it means more or less the same thing and, by some miracle, it fits the text. Making sense – something I resolve to do more often in the New Year – I’ll give it a week…

New Year is not a favourite time of year for me. It just seems odd to be celebrating the passing of yet another precious segment of one’s meagre allotted time. It doesn’t help that New Year falls just one day before my birthday. It’s as if, having reminded me of my own mortality on Monday, life decides to go for it again on Tuesday. It is like turning on the TV at the end of The X Factor only to find that Britain’s Got Talent has just started instead. Like Simon Cowell, there is always too much human frailty to go around. In my head, New Year always prompts a personal review of the year that’s been. It is like a school report. It is always stamped ‘Could do better’. Whilst Christmas is the season to be jolly, perhaps this is the season to be introspective. The season for a psychological disc clean and reboot. It is the time of year to give thanks for all of those who love you – even when you’re being a dick – and all of those who stand by you, even when you yourself are sitting down on the job. It is most certainly not that I have nothing to look forward to – I am singularly fortunate in that respect. The future is bright, but it’s my part in it that’s the problem. Somehow I always feel like I’ve turned up for Hamlet dressed as the pantomime dame. I am the Jimmy Krankie on the Question Time panel. I am the man who just wanted his car mending at an AA meeting.

Looking back is seldom comforting. How often can you truly review what you’ve done, how you’ve reacted, and think ‘you know, I handled that really well’? More often than not, looking back invokes guilt and shame, plus the feeling of inadequacy only otherwise felt in the swimming pool changing rooms. Perhaps what I need to do is to view the New Year as a celebration of future possibilities. Looking forward is so much easier. In the future, I am going to be great. In the future I will look back on my present self with a wistful ‘tsk’ of sadness at how poor I used to be. In the future I will see the New Year as a time to affirm my own goodliness, but for the present, I will see it as a time when I would rather be in bed before the fireworks start if that’s ok with you.

At the dawning of each New Year I make the same three resolutions:
1. Be better
2. Be kinder
3. Be thinner.
It is self-evident that each year I fail miserably to deliver on all three counts.

My desire to be ‘better’ is not a competitive thing. I’m not seeking to improve a PB. I don’t want to run a 5K quicker than before (actually ‘at all’ would be more accurate) I don’t want to get better at darts, at snooker, at golf (or any of those things that, now you come to mention it, I would really quite like to get a bit better at) and I don’t especially want to be better than anybody else in particular. What I actually want to be is better than me. I’m always struck by people who are more aware than me, are more interested than me, are more interesting than me; are better listeners, better talkers… Just better really. I aspire to be like them, not better than them (I am not competitive enough) but better than me. And, although it sounds like a really easy job, I don’t think that I will ever achieve it, but at least I aspire to it and that’s something, isn’t it?

And being kinder is, in my mind, something of a by-product of being better, but I think of it separately because, quite frankly, empathy is a tough nut to crack isn’t it? Generally, I find myself only a very short way along the empathetic path before I become aware that my mind has begun to wander onto how ‘things’ – whatever those things might be – could affect me. Kind of ‘Oh, how sad, the milkman’s wife has died. Does this mean I won’t have any milk for my cereal in the morning?’ I try to keep a lid on it, I really do, but it requires a conscious effort – and I’m not sure that it should.

And boy! do I struggle with the sympathy/pity dichotomy. I wish that somebody could draw a line that I should never ever cross. Generally speaking, feeling sympathy is ok: if not welcomed, then at least accepted, but pity, oh dear, that’s another beast altogether. Nobody welcomes pity. Nobody wants to be pitied. But, Lord! how easily sympathy smudges into pity and how incapable am I of spotting the moment it happens. I think if I was better, if I was kinder, I would know this without knowing it. Without knowingly knowing it. ‘People skills’ I think it is called. I have no people skills. Whatever the occasion, there is always a tiny bit of my brain that is thinking about me and, when I become aware of it, I dedicate another little bit of my brain to pushing that thought back to where it belongs. Then I find another little bit of my brain becomes quite interested in what is going on over there and before I know it… well, I’ve got a very limited amount of brain to go around and, bit by bit, it becomes so self absorbed that I could be talking to Genghis Khan about child care and I would be none the wiser.

And the thin thing? Well, that’s quite a different kettle of fish. It has nothing to do with vanity. It has nothing to do with health. It is all to do with control. I like to think that, should I wish to, I could control what I eat and what I drink with no difficulty at all. I fail to understand how anybody could not do so. And so, each New Year, I resolve to lose weight in an attempt to prove to myself that I do have that control. And each New Year I prove that I do not have that control. I stubbornly remain the weight I have been for the last who-knows-how-many years and for every chocolate bar I cut out, I eat another portion of chips. Every time I drink water instead of wine, I put a whisky in it. Every time I eat an apple instead of a cake, I actually just eat an apple and then a cake. I realise I have an addictive personality, so I try to keep my addictions relatively benign. I don’t gamble and I don’t do drugs because I know I would be hopeless, both at doing them and at giving them up. A Mars Bar here and there seems both healthier and cheaper… Actually, perhaps I’ve just seen the answer. This year I will change my New Year’s resolutions. This year I will resolve to be thinner – it won’t happen, but it doesn’t matter – because I will also resolve to give up drugs and to give up gambling: I will achieve both without any effort at all – and I will feel all the better for it…

Happy New Year one and all. I hope that the next twelve months will bring you health, peace and happiness – and a little chocolate and wine from time to time…