A few thoughts about New Years Eve…

Why do we celebrate New Years? Is it because it has been a great year? Is it because it has been a bad year? Or is it because you feel that you have to because you went out last year, or three years ago, or once when you were 16 at a pub underage and your mother picked you up at 12.15 in the morning when you were so drunk you were practically cross-eyed?

That’s the thing about the bizarre event. No matter your state of mind post-Christmas, whether that’s feeling financially screwed after spending twice as much on presents as you had originally planned, tired from the rollercoaster of your personal life and staying with your parents, or the first thing that I’ve said just here followed by the second thing that I said after that first point, you now HAVE to end it with what should be the best total night of your freaking life. You have to be surrounded by loved ones. You have to be at the best club or at least out of the house. All your previous New Years merge into some super bouncy castle orgy so you feel the need that you have to do something that somehow matches or is better than *INSERT THE NUMBERS OF YEARS* you’ve been alive.

But the thing is this, whether you want to accept it or not. New Years Eve, sucks.

Why is this?

Simple. Midnight is too early. Way too early if you are going out. I mean think of midnight in films and in those TV shows. It is THE climax of the WHOLE plot. THE WHOLE PLOT. And in real life there’s fireworks. There’s this expectation of snogging someone’s face off, or having the best time of your life dancing round various handbags on a nightclub floor. The purpose of New Years is that you have to be somewhere ‘cool’ and ‘fun’ for the countdown. It has to be perfect, and you have to feel perfect.

But it’s never perfect. You’re at home and you’ll pre-drink too late, you’ll look at your watch when you get to the venue and think “bugger is that the time already?”. You’ll then rush for drinks at an overcrowded bar with dodgy service, down one drink with your friends after you are moderately sober once more before the DJ (who has forgotten himself / herself that is midnight) panics and shouts “TENNINEEIGHTSEVENSIXFIVEFOURTHREETWOONE” before David Guetta “When Your Gone” blasts through the stereo.

And that’s it. NIGHT NIGHT.

New Years is an awkward night based around something you can’t control and its hard to get into the feeling of. IT’S WEIRD.

There is ‘the alternative’ to New Years Eve if you decide not to go out at all, of course, an evening in front of the tele. But not a normal night in front of the TV that tires you out and then you can toddle off to your own bed. OH NO. You have to stay up don’t you? You have to keep going past midnight because heading to bed beforehand would make you the saddest man alive. You have to ‘celebrate’. You have to ‘drink a bottle of wine’. You have to ‘talk in a bit of excitement about New Years with some of your friends’. You have to watch a ‘100 best bits of the year with C-list celebrities you either loathe or don’t recognise’, or an ITV drama about someone whose dead, then another drama or rejected comedy programme that will merge into nothingness… then, just when you’re wishing that we abandoned GMT altogether and moved forward in line with the French Jools Holland Annual Hootenanny!

a show that for 53 minutes just consists of “Wahey. We’re pretend drunk. We’re completely not live. We’re interviewing celebrity friends even though they’re not actually here on New Years Eve as they are at much better parties than this one. HOOTENANNY *HOOTENANNY* HOOTENANNY *HOOTENANNY* HOOTENANNY *HOOTENANNY*… I’M HITTING ALL THE KEYS ON MY PIANO AT ONCE. I’M HITTING ALL THE KEYS ON PIANO AT ONCE…..”).

Of course you could always watch New Year Live, a show that purely consists of Myleene Klass singing alongside a violin in front of an ice rink for 13 and a half minutes before low and behold BIG BEN AND THE FIREWORKS THEMSELVES. Unfortunately the laws of the Universe must state that somebody in the room with you will ruin it because at without warning they utter the words “Oh look at the fireworks. I wonder how much they cost? What a waste of money. Should have been spent on something worthwhile like hospitals.”

HATE.

IT IS NEW YEARS EVE. SOD OFF.

So what is my advice for New Years Eve? Have low expectations. Incredibly low expectations. Scrape the barrel of what a low expectation can be and then get tinnitus because you cannot stand the noise of the barrel that you are indeed scraping to lower your expectations.

Then hopefully everything will be less of a downer when, as it always does, it never goes to plan.

Or down a bottle of wine. DOWN THREE BOTTLES OF WINE.