SUNDAY, 12 JANUARY 2025

When I was much younger, a young man in his twenties and thirties, the start of a new year always felt very significant. I much preferred New Year’s Eve to Christmas. OK, we had to put up with Andy Stewart and Moira Anderson and bagpipers in Edinburgh and all the other clichés about Bonnie Scotland on New Year’s Eve, which was much less enjoyable than watching The Wizard of Oz on Christmas Day. But apart from that, the New Year was a lot more fun.

And for me, as a teapot atheist, it felt more meaningful. It represented a fresh beginning, a chance to transform my life and try to move towards being a better person with a better future. Like most people at that time, I made and rapidly broke resolutions each year. And over the years I did most of the obvious things at least once, like Trafalgar Square at midnight, despite my hatred or perhaps I should say my phobia of crowds. My long-term partner and I housed parties where our gang of friends gathered and drank ourselves silly, waited for the bongs of Big Ben to welcome in the New Year, and then we all hugged and gave each other shy pecks on the cheek. At other times I even embraced strangers in city centres, on one of those rare occasions when we British allow the ice to thaw a little and awkwardly accept the risk of letting other people enter our tenaciously guarded private space. Admittedy, when I was abroad, which was most of the time after 1996, I would play the Phil Spector Christmas Album and sing along with the Ronettes and Frosty the Snowman on Christmas Day, then try not to guffaw at Spector’s huge dollop of schmaltz in his Yuletide message to the listener at the end of the LP. But the bulk of my enthusiasm was still reserved for the last day in December.

This year, just as I did in nearly all of the new years I saw in during the 21^st century, I went to bed way before midnight, too tired and disengaged for even a celebratory glass of wine. So I’d survived another year – so what? Was that really worth losing a good night’s sleep?

A lot of the reason for this is doubtless that I’m older now and have slowly grown increasingly glum and anti-social. But also I suspect that I reflect a general foreboding people have that the world is spinning out of control and heading for a very dark place, so no one wants to think too much about the future. It seems a world where few of us want to go, except for a handful of control-freak neo-Fascists who can’t wait to see the reopening of Dachau. I recognise that this sentence sounds somewhat hysterical, but what else are we to make of a world where a man is voted back into office even when he has made it clear that he doesn’t really believe in democracy unless he wins and actually did his best to overthrow it when he lost; a world where a bilious billionaire openly funds neo-Nazis, bitter culture wars rage and public opinion seems to be completely and aggressively polarised, hatred of foreigners and Muslims and transexuals and a host of random Others is escalating day by day, and we still have all the old familiar nightmares such as nuclear armageddon to worry about, but also a whole new bunch of fears around climate change? Surely it makes perfect sense to want to slip under the duvet and not come back out?

And the idea of special days is generally a load of tosh. The cosmos doesn’t know that the 25^th December was the day of Jesus’s birth (and anyway, it almost certainly wasn’t), or that 2024 has become 2025, or even whether it’s a Tuesday or a Thursday. Human beings can divide the endless fabric of time into almost any system they wish: the use of the solar or lunar calendar being an obvious example. Yet divide it we must, for both practical and psychological reasons. On a practical level, it helped us to survive by making it possible to predict the future and, in agricultural societies, knowing when to plant and harvest crops, while dates such as the summer and winter solstices make psychological sense in cultures which had no scientific basis for understanding the seasons and needed the reassurance that the dead sun would be reborn.

But we shouldn’t feel too superior to our ancestors because even in our modern, shiny, technophilic world, we seem to have retained this psychological need to designate certain days as magical and celebrate them. Business has not been slow to recognise this atavistic imperative and have gleefully added a whole new set of red days to the calendar and changed and extended the meaning of the old ones. This has led not only to the crass commercialisation of religious festivals such as Christmas, but also to the addition of days which are much more plainly the brainchild of business, such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and the modern Halloween, and these relatively recent inventions are spreading across the globe due to western cultural influence. Some of these special days, such as birthdays, seem completely natural to us in the west, but they were not always celebrated throughout the globe. For instance, when I first went to live and work in Indonesia, I was shocked to learn that many older people didn’t even know the date on which they were born and even those who did seemed to have little interest in celebrating it. Nowadays, of course, modern Indonesians have birthday parties with cakes and candles which are little different from those in the west.

So my attitude to most of these red letter days, especially modern consumerist monstrosities like Black Friday (which some of my Asian students now refer to as a ‘festival’ for heaven’s sake), is bah humbug. But New Year’s Day still has some attraction for me. I retain a fondness for the idea of a day when we reflect upon the past and look into the future and try to become better people. So I wish the handful of people who come on here all the best and a belated Happy New Year. Let’s hope my gloomy prognostications about the future are proved totally wrong and we still have the desire, and more importantly the freedom, to imagine transforming ourselves after I am long gone from this earth.