NEW YEAR’S EVE.

Well, Sunday is New Year’s Eve, a day and night on which we, to paraphrase Jawaharlal Nehru, “Stand on the threshold of a new year.” But is it really such a big deal?

I remember I went to a New Year’s Eve party when I was 10, and I wished it had been an occasion where I could have had a support worker who had asked the host if the two of us could have our tea in the games room, and at around 9:30pm, the support worker could have gone to my father and said, “Peter wants to go home,” and my father had said, “All right,” and given my support worker the house keys and we went home and watched some TV. I wasn’t all that happy about the New Year that year for this reason, the following year would be my final year of primary school, and I hadn’t, at that point, had the intellectual maturity, which I developed the following year, to think, “Okay, this is my final year, what do I want to achieve before high school?” Okay, I would have liked to have done better at math, and one thing that I was looking forward to, once it started, was having assignments that we had a week to complete, where a map was stamped onto our project book and we had to find certain places on the map, have pictures and present five facts about the place on the map, and the teacher wanted us to really work hard on it. I would have loved for them to be fortnightly assignments, as in, we are given one on the Monday, submit the following Monday, the teacher marked it and we were given one the following Monday, due the Monday after, but they were infrequent. I didn’t learn a lot that year, in retrospect.

That year, I was also moving out of a decade year. At 19, I became reflective, the day before my 20th Birthday. And at 29, I started to think, “Okay, this is my last year in my 20s,” and then, “This is my last weekend in my 20s, so, I want to watch The Bill on Saturday night.” Which I did. At 39, I was the same.

I don’t like a fuss being made of my birthday, and I never have. So, I feel the same about a New Year. It’s just another day that doesn’t need a great deal of fanfare.

I see New Year’s Resolutions as being a bit like obtaining a new car. Some people, when they get a new car, especially if it’s a company car, choose a different colour so that everybody in the street can see that they have a new car. Say, they obtain it on the Friday, they like the new car smell, they take it for a drive on the Saturday, and they wash it. They come home on the Tuesday, and they wash it, and the Thursday and the following Saturday, and then, once the new car smell fades and the 1,000kms service has been done, washing once or twice a week fades to once or twice a fortnight, then, once a month, then, by the time the car is six months old, they wash it when they feel like it, and say they get a new car every three years, they only wash the car before it gets traded in, and then the old cycle starts.

If you want to go out and celebrate New Years, okay, but one Japanese custom that I like is that Japanese people make sure that any amount of money owing is paid before midnight on New Year’s Eve to start the year afresh. And I think being able to start the New Year with a clean slate is good. But I like a quiet New Year’s Eve, as, after all, it’s just another day.