At this eleventh hour
there is a choice to be made and it is Hobson's choice:
Either the purgatorial
limbo of a party, where time will slow to a near standstill as the
outgoing year drags its feet like an irritable child reluctant to go
to bed. And on the horizon the god-awful moment where asinine social
convention compels you to link hands with people who you would quite
happily nudge over a high precipice if you thought that you would get
away with it, while the whole rotten lot of you pretend to know the
words to Auld Lang Syne, and
give a single ounce of a fuck as to their meaning and sentiment.
Or, if not the party, then
the dismal prospect of the Hootenanny on BBC2. The spectacle
of Jools Holland locked in stilted conversation with Dawn French,
before accompanying Dave Stewart (formerly of The Eurythmics)
on boogie-woogie piano in a re-tooled version of a song that he wrote
for Alisha's Attic in 1996. I
was young then. Even the prospect of Oasis releasing
another dreadful album, written in the plodding tempo of a knackered
dray horse, could not dampen my enthusiasm for life.
The greatest and most
inspired New Year's Eve celebration I ever participated in took place
in 1999 during the premature millennium festivities: I began
urinating shortly before the stroke of midnight - a continuous stream
of piss that, like a gracefully arcing, golden bridge, spanned two
arbitrary ages, each one bearing the weight of a thousand years.
"Start as you mean to
go on!" I yelled to no one in particular as outside fireworks
pointed at the witching hour, like batteries of nuclear weapons,
launched on either side of it, and the sky was momentarily filled
with colour and noise.
