Another New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve - it always feels as if you should be writing or saying something portentous, something significant on this date.  Unfortunately, I've never really been that big on New Year celebrations.  Especially as I get older - marking off yet another year of one's life starts becoming ominous.  Besides, I'm old enough - just - to remember a time when New Year's day wasn't a Bank Holiday and, if you weren't Scottish, the celebration wasn't such a big deal.  That's right folks, up until the early seventies, here in England, January 1st was, if it fell on a week day, just another working day.  (Albeit one that many people did take off and that many employers observed as a holiday).  When I was younger, I did used to go out and see in the New Year with friends at my local pub - but then it changed hands and suddenly Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve became ticketed events, which locals like myself boycotted, finding either alternate locations or moving our celebrations forward a day.  But my appetite for such events, let alone my stamina to endure them, waned with the years.  Nowadays, I'm content to stay at home, with a plate of sausage rolls, cheese, mince pies and a glass of something, (probably bourbon this year, but maybe Bushmills).  This year, I've decided to eschew any of those bloody TV New Year's Eve shows - with their patronising admonitions directed at us poor people on our own 'at this time' - and instead watch a triple bill of Bond movies: I've already done You Only Live Twice (1967) and I'm now halfway through On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) and intend seeing in the New Year with Diamonds Are Forever (1971). 

I feel that it is somehow apt to spend the last day of the year watching old and familiar films - it is very reassuring while everyone is urging you to 'move on' in the New Year, to 'start anew', 'put the past behind you' and so on.  In reality, life just isn't like that - the past defines us and is always with us.  We can't conveniently shrug it off, like a snake sloughing its old skin, so we might as well learn to live with it and see it as a building block for the future.  As I've noted many times, I don't do New Year resolutions.  They are utterly pointless, made in haste and therefore never kept.  Besides, if you want to do something, just do it, regardless of the time of year.  I do, however, make plans for the future.  In the coming year I need to replace this wheezing old laptop, for one thing.  I also have a programme of home improvements which, hopefully, will be kicked off by replacing my draughty sash windows.  With that done, I can turn to that long planned expansion of the model railway, but before that (and the window replacement) I have to finally sort out my broadband and switch to fibre (with anyone but BT).  Then there's a new bathroom and a new kitchen to contemplate, both badly need updating.  So, there's plenty for me to do in 2025, provided my natural indolence doesn't get the better of me, (which it has several times this past year).  Anyway, Diana Rigg is about to drive her Mercury Cougar through that stock car race, so I'll just wish everyone a Happy New Year, before giving her (and that car) my full atetntion.