A New 'New Year's'

“This year, I resolve to... make no resolutions.”

I have made this New Year’s Resolution for the past several years and, since doing so, my success rate at keeping New Year’s Resolutions has soared dramatically.

To be perfectly honest with you, I do have a certain pragmatism about this New Year business.

While I have no objection to people abusing themselves by becoming drunk, diseased and pregnant over the passage of one night it occurs to me that the notion of the celebration is somewhat vague.

The grandiose celebrations that are lavishly spread around the World to welcome in a New Year is something that affects, not just our pocket, but our psyche.

Let me explain.

A few hundred years ago some itinerant monk or mathematician—possibly one man with two hats, decided that the calendar that was currently in use was inadequate. It failed to allow for the idea of the Earth’s orbit around the sun was not three hundred and sixty five days at all. A year, it was demonstrated, was perceptibly more than that.

Sadly, there was no way of dividing a day up into small parts. We could not, at eight o’clock in the morning on one specific day, say that we had had enough of that day for now and that it must become midnight immediately.

As a consequence, the addition of an extra day every fourth year was the way forward to make up the extra time consumed by the orbital wanderings of our planet.

Brilliant idea. There is no doubting the wisdom involved in this decision. There is also a staggering astonishment at the will to adapt to this new system by the current ‘Powers That Be’ knowing, as we do, how resistant ‘Powers That Be’ are to change.

We are also aware of how resistant everybody is to change. To adopt this new system was a paradigm shift of the first water!

So. What happened?

Somebody, somewhere, in the halls of power made a decision.

“A week Monday it will be January First of the New Year,” came the edict from above.

And so it was.

The first of January for the new calendar was an arbitrarily selected date. It could have been any day at all. We could well be celebrating our New Year on what should have been August 14^th but for the whim of a ‘Power That Be’.

And so we fix our eyes to the television to see that first array of fireworks over New Zealand that marks the first moment of the New Year creeping across the Pacific and into our lives.

After only a short while, can it be only a week? We are plunged into yet another festivity.

Vast sums are spent once again but, this time, on fireworks and alcohol. Alcohol that lowers the inhibitions and enables us to dance like disjointed marionettes whilst becoming increasingly louder and incoherent.

Thus there are so many who greet the dawn of the first day of the New Year in a parlous state of despair, wishing that the pain rummaging around in our heads would go away; others not yet knowing that they have obtained some social disease and others that they are now pregnant with a vicarious gift from the New Year Fairy.

But, hey! It was fun. For a few hours, that we can recollect, we have had a wonderful time. Now we can spend the next eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours until the next New Year’s celebrations asking everyone if we had a good time. Or not.

Of course, the ‘knock on’ effect of this is:

Astrology. This randomly applied day, this day that was nominated by the ‘Powers That Be’, is the basis for the astrological forecast that we avidly soak up from each edition of the Dailies.

You may be pregnant from the festivities but, at least, you can comfort yourself with the idea that, were it not for the spin of a capricious fate, you could still be a ‘Virgo’!