I hope you all had a Happy New Year, I really do. Yesterday I had the great misfortune to spend a small chunk of the day out and about amongst the Great British Public as it went about its business preparing for “the party night of the year” and we all looked pretty miserable at the prospect, if the truth be told. Not being much of a reveller myself nowadays, I notice the amount of stress the whole idea of New Year’s Eve seems to put people under and I really wonder why most of us really bother.
The supermarkets I had to go in were chaotic and heaving as if the backlog from being closed for all of one day last week had finally slammed into the dam and we were all out chasing the last bottle of milk in the known universe. Actually, there seemed to be precious little milk being bought, given the mountains of “party food” and booze being heaped into shopping trolleys that had been similarly piled high a mere seven days earlier, and I did start to wonder where we were putting it all.
It feels like there’s a fear out there, a fear that the happiness of others that you’ve taken responsibility for by hosting a party might be less than perfect, and someone, someday soon, maybe even tomorrow, will say those socially damning words “Well, I didn’t enjoy that very much…”
It’s as if there’s a dreadful hatred of the prospect that, say if Uncle Jimmy doesn’t get the precise can of beer he wants, or Auntie Jean isn’t able to get a sausage roll on demand, then somehow the whole event will be a total disaster and their night will be ruined. We are striving towards an idea of perfection and a fear of other people’s expectations that we can never achieve because we’re all dealing with people here.
Annoying, aggravating, cynical, jealous, spiteful, sarcastic human beings, who are also capable of being wonderful, amazing, brilliant, supportive and forgiving human beings too, but all of whom have their own ideas and expectations of what their perfect New Year’s party is going to be, and all of whom likely in the end to be slightly disappointed when life fails to live up to those hopes and dreams.
If I’m being honest, it does all have an air of manic desperation about it, as if there is a general need to have “fun at any cost” because we feel that we’re supposed to. Somehow it’s expected. Of course if your idea of “fun” is drinking yourself into a coma, or pouncing on someone you find vaguely attractive and shoving a much resisted tongue in their mouth and expecting them to show some gratitude for the experience, there’s a good possibility that you had a good night, but for everyone else I imagine that, despite all the most hopeful of intentions for having a “happy” New Year, the reality of it was probably “iffy” at best.
In that sense, maybe a New Year’s party is a microcosm of our entire lives, and we’re all not just that terribly keen to look at ourselves in that light and find ourselves coming up short.
For myself I find it almost impossible to approach any New Year with a sense of hope or optimism, because it’s always got a strange undercurrent of fear lurking just beneath the surface. Such is the life of the terminally anxious. Will this be the year I finally stop getting away with it? Will this be the year when I finally balls everything up and everything falls apart? Will this be the year when I lose everything and everyone?
Obviously there’s always the possibility that things might just get better, but I imagine, for most of us, things will stay more or less the same. I look back on the year just passed and find it all a bit bland, more of a table wine than a vintage, but I suspect that I feel that about most years when I think about it.
The same grey and bleak landscape will greet me this morning as I saw at nightfall yesterday, although now it has the added gloominess of a lack of anything to look forward to added to its demeanour, as the time for merriment is now in the past and the need to pay for it all begins. The serious business of life and living is back on the agenda.
Maybe it’s time to book a holiday?
At least this New Year starts off being numerologically interesting with its opening day having the 1/1/11 label. All odd numbers of course, which is naturally suspicious, but the simplicity and symmetry of it is pretty enough to be encouraging.
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