Happy New Year?

It’s what we say isn’t it, “Happy New Year!”? I sometimes think it’s more in hope than expectation. No, worse than that, I think it’s a kind of mantra we repeat in the hope (but probably not the expectation) that if we say it often enough and loud enough it will be true. I don’t think there’s anything particularly happy about New Year.

It wasn’t something we really celebrated in our family when I was a child. I don’t remember any New Year parties in the same way that I recall Christmas events, at least, not until I was in my teens, and then it was something my friends and I did, not my family. The first one, at least I think it was the first (I think it was a New Year event and not a Christmas party) was at my best friend’s house. Memory suggests (and because of the amount of Cinzano consumed, memory is a little hazy) that Jo’s parents thought they were doing a responsible thing by catering a party for about twenty teenagers with relatively mild alcoholic beverages (we’d been doing parties with alcohol for a couple of years by now I think) while they spent the evening at their neighbour’s house. Really the mind boggles. They must have been model teenagers themselves to think that we’d behave well. (We did not.)

Jo didn’t invite twenty people, she invited about six and the six of us drank the beverages intended for twenty. It’s fair to say it did not end well. I don’t remember much about it although I do recall that I had at one point adopted an American accent and couldn’t seem to get rid of it no matter how annoying everyone else found it. By the time I was standing, disgraced, in my parents’ living room I was being accused by my mother of slurring my words. I inshishted that I wash sshnot schlurring my wordsh but was sent upstairs to bed under no illusions that this would be the last I’d hear about my appallingness, bent to open my pyjama drawer and promptly threw up all over my neatly folded nightwear. Mother had not felt able to stay sitting downstairs after yelling at me so came up for round two, saw the pukey PJs and promptly erupted all over again. The next day, the pharmacy where I worked part time was the rota chemist and open for the fulfilment of prescriptions and my presence was required at 9am sharp. Mother made me cycle the three or four miles to work as punishment. I and my hangover spent a miserable morning trying not to throw up again as I washed out smelly pill bottles and tried to smile at germ-ridden customers coming in for their cough drops and condoms. I think that washed out sicky headachey exhaustion settled on me and tainted every New Year yet to come.

As an older teen, living in Scotland, Hogmanay was suddenly a bit of a big deal. The kids at my new school all belonged to wealthy parents who lived in grander houses than I was used to and it seems the tradition was for all the parents to declare Open House and everyone would go to everyone else’s house at some point during the evening and every parent vied with all the others to have the best food and drink on offer. These were black tie affairs, again, not something I was overly familiar with and in retrospect, I suspect I was primarily invited because I was an interesting specimen rather than because I was one of the gang. I didn’t own a ballgown but I did have a pink silk bridesmaid dress from my big cousin’s wedding, that I cut up to make a huge puffy skirt that I wore with a black sequinned crop top, fishnet gloves and stilettos. I’m grateful to the 80s and Madonna for making it such that such a look passed muster!

I remember most of those parties as being a lot of fun if a bit too excessive on the old white wine front. There were teenage fumblings in each other’s underwear, smoking, drinking, staggering from one house to the next. On one occasion the fumblings took on a more sinister tone and I experienced what was not to be the only sexual assault I’d suffer. I’m glossing over it here because I have no desire to revisit the event but it was another strike against New Year as far as I was concerned. New Year no longer brought to mind taffeta party dresses and sparkling heels. It was more of an old coat that smelled vaguely of vomit, old ashtrays and Andrew’s Liver Salts. And now we could add in the aroma of unwanted bodily fluids and a hefty dusting of disgrace and shame all over the shoulders. This was not a coat I wanted to wear.

In later years, working in hospitality, Hogmanay was just exhausting. Battling to get through the night and then queuing up at the hotel public telephone box to call loved ones and wish them a Happy New Year left me feeling nothing but loneliness as I put the phone down on the last family member and returned to washing the bar floor and sorting the bottle bin. My New Year coat was now somehow simultaneously cumbersome and yet thin. Bulky and drab, but with no warmth left in it.

Things should have improved once our children arrived. We found ourselves invited to celebrate the end of one year and the start of the next with other parents we knew. We played games, ate and drank too much and talked the night away while smalls watched TV and slept on haphazard mattresses in other people’s bedrooms and it was fun until we all woke up the next day and the children still had their usual high levels of energy and demands for their usual high levels of attention and activity which we were ill-equipped to deliver, having expended all our energies the night before. If you’ll allow me to drag the coat metaphor out one more time, it was now patched with exhaustion, inadequacy and disappointment in my ability to do better.

So it’s no wonder then that I associate New Year with depression. I even did a photography project around the ‘lost days’, the uneasy sense of liminality that weighs on me at this time of year. But I had hoped that this year would be different. For the last few years I’ve been fighting my annual bout of winter blues by focusing on the good things to be found in the darker months - the cosiness of candlelight, the warm soft textures of blankets on the sofa, the search for photographic opportunities to be found in shop and street lighting that aren’t possible in the summer months when it’s still light at 11 O’Clock. I think it has mostly worked.

For New Year this year I was going to not drink too much, not stay up too late, enjoy the company of our hosts and their other guests but still feel up for a good brisk N’er Day Walk the next day. Except I caught a cough a few days before the Christmas break and coughed, and coughed and sniffled and coughed and couldn’t stand or lie down without prompting more coughing, couldn’t walk or talk without hacking my bags out, was breathless from going for a pee, too tired to leave the sofa for days on end and begged the children not to make me laugh because it hurt to breathe and spent New Year’s Eve in bed reading one of my Christmas books and New Year’s Day looking out at the grey and wishing I could be out in it instead of just watching from the wrong side of the window.

I don’t like to think of myself as a superstitious person. It seems unintelligent somehow and while there are many things I’m not, (beautiful, thin, rich, overly endowed with friendships, able to walk in heels any more, able to remember where I put my glasses or my phone, athletic, confident, perfectly pitched soprano) I do like to think I’m reasonably clever. Too clever by half but twice as lazy seems to echo down from past conversations with teachers. Anyway, not superstitious. And yet, I’ve always rather clung on to the idea that the way New Year goes is some kind of template for the next 360-odd days. If I eat healthily on this day it perhaps increases the chance I’ll eat more healthily for the rest of the year. If I have a clean house on the first of January maybe the rest of my year will be tidier. The converse is of course also assumed. It’s utterly without sense or foundation but I did worry that being so lethargic, so lacking in vim and vigour on January 1st did not bode well for the next 12 months. I recognise this as a version of the perfectionism that affects me so negatively. If I can’t do it perfectly then I won’t do it at all. If I’m not already good at it then there’s no point trying. If I mess up the diet one lunch time then I’ve messed up the whole diet and I may as well give in and eat nothing but deep fried mars bars.

This was the impetus that made me take a photograph on my phone from the end of my bed on New Year’s Day this year. For some reason it seemed important that I take a photograph on the first day of the year. The light was lovely but it wasn’t a need to capture the light, it was a need to take a photograph as if not doing it might have dire consequences for my ability to take photographs the rest of the year. The very epitome of superstition! Even then, I worried that it might not even count because it had been taken on my phone not my ‘real’ camera. And I hadn’t gone outside, hunted and found the ideal inspirational New Year’s Day shot. It was just a phone pic of the Christmas light left on the windowsill while the dim grey daylight filtered into my bedroom. I don’t know what dire consequences I was afraid of, but realising this I also realised that I was tying myself in knots and feeling bad because I might have missed taking a photograph on this particular day. There are plenty of days when I don’t take photographs. What is so important about this one? The answer of course is nothing. I was agonising over something that didn’t matter, and the only way out was to actively ignore the voices that told me I now couldn’t do enough or be enough to have a successful year. To decide that actually, the phone photo was enough. It was an accurate reflection of the way things were but it wasn’t necessarily, or even necessarily wasn’t a reflection of how things had to be the next day, week, month or even year. Tomorrow’s another day. There will be other photographs. This bug will eventually go and I will regain energy and health and zest for life.

On the second of January I went for a walk. It was only for ten minutes or so but I watched the sun go down over on the other side of the water as my daughter and I ambled along the seafront with other walkers. The sublime light took my breath away and I only coughed a little. On the way home we admired the Christmas tree at our window and agreed that we felt better for going out. I was tired afterwards but it was a start; a day late, but I think that’s probably okay.