New years eve

It's New Year's Eve. Late night telly tells me that there are millions of people out there "a hootin and a hollerin" busy partying and wishing everyone the best.
When I was younger the New Year dance was an event. Mary as pretty as a peach was there in her party dress, and Gillian with the dark green eyes who looked into yours with a terrifying come hither. Jill, the unapproachable Jill, was miss ice cool. "Can I have this dance" a dream rehearsed each time the music started but plucked away by someone more assured, you were left holding Sandra and wondering why.
The chance to kiss was what brought us here in the first place, and mistletoe proclaimed your right to a kiss, well at least in theory ! We were relatively naive in those days, no, compared to today we were very naive. A girl, we placed on a pedestal and the clever ones knew it !


Over the years New Years Eve went from being in the village hall to the town Mecca dance palace and then to the pubs and house based parties. The innocence of the village hall with its 'all seeing' community to keep an eye on affairs, to the inevitably 'over the top' boozy party which made the morning after a time of worried recollection.
Then there seems to have been a cessation of everything.
Going out became a family affair and one became subverted, undermined by the needs of others, only emerging from the drought when the 'focus of our existence' decided that they wanted their freedom and we looked around in vain for a place familiar to the ones we remembered.
Casual was out, your name had to be on a list, even in a pub, a pub you had supported all year.
The age of the contrived event, dressing up and by invitation only was here.
The mass displays of sentimentality, the passing of the old and the welcoming of the new has become a gigantic compulsive obsession, witness the global competition for which city around the world has the biggest and spends the most on the Hogmanay Firework Display.
The "arr" and the "oohs" as the pounds go up in smoke seem to represent our inability to prioritise any sort of value as we see cherished institutions taken apart and privatised for lack of money.
Like cattle we are complacent even as we are loaded to our final destination so long as the mood music is playing and the image of the MacBurger still lingers in our sight.

Happy New Year to you all and I hope that the coming year will cause us all to reflect on the importance of the small and the attainable, since each is still within our reach !!