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I know lots of people who say they don’t like New Year’s Eve.

They mean, I think, that they don’t like gaudy celebration or forced jollity. How can anybody not like New Year’s Eve itself? It’s just another tick of the clock, no more significant to your pulsing gizzards than a birthday or Christmas or an anniversary or a week last Wednesday, after all.

Perhaps they mean they do not like what it symbolises: the end of something old, the start of something new. But New Year’s Eve can symbolise pretty much anything, really: remembrance, hope, forgiveness, celebration, redemption, resolution. It’s just casting the runes, reading the tealeaves. You make of them what you will.

Perhaps they mean they do not like the way New Year’s Eve puts a full stop on another year of your life. But so does every beat of your heart. Flub. There goes another calendar year. Flub. There goes another one. I’ve always believed it best to be facing forward at all times.

Perhaps they don’t like the sentimental reflection, or the honours: arise, Sir Wiggo. I agree. What a load of old baloney, and the way the honours list has become an extension of the C-list pages of the Daily Mail and Hello magazine is grotesque indeed.

Talking of the Daily Mail, to which I am now addicted, I see it is warning us of the dangers of another newly-identified disease: General Anxiety Disorder. Sufferers worry about whether they’ve locked the door, or whether the chicken’s defrosted, or whether they should cross the road. See why I’m addicted? You couldn’t make up stuff this funny, and believe me I try. (It is, of course, the internet edition of the Daily Mail to which I am addicted. Buying the wretched thing in a shop would be quite impossible, unless they had a copy of something less embarrassing in which I could hide it. Like the Jimmy Savile Fan Club magazine.)

Anyway, here’s what I like about New Year’s Eve.

It gives a moment to stop and think about what you’ve been doing recently, and it focuses the mind on the big events of a calendar year, wide and narrow. Wide: it’s been a year in which our nation has stumbled ever backwards into the every-man-for-himself and to-hell-with-the-hindmost attitude of the vile Thatcher years, the tugging of the forelock, the deification of the rich at the expense of the poor. All the things that brought us to this pass. Narrow: to me, it was a year in which my best friend since boyhood died and I had to confront mortality very closely indeed for the first time. John’s mortality, thank the Crab, not mine. Yet.

It does give an excuse for a party, too, which I like. I prefer spontaneous parties, of course, but these days, at my age, with the bastard with the scythe having left his first calling card on my particular doorstep, any party will do.

We partook of a morsel of that old misery-guts Thomas Hardy last week, as I always do on Christmas Eve, and it sent me looking up his The Darkling Thrush, written for the end of the 19^th century but, as we stare out at a landscape that is desolate literally, and spiritually, its final note of hope seems a good one.

 

I leant upon a coppice gate 

 

    When Frost was spectre-gray,

 

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

 

    The weakening eye of day.

 

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

 

    Like strings of broken lyres,

 

And all mankind that haunted nigh

 

    Had sought their household fires.

 

 

 

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

 

    The Century’s corpse outleant,

 

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

 

    The wind his death-lament.

 

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

 

    Was shrunken hard and dry,

 

And every spirit upon earth

 

    Seemed fervourless as I.

 

 

 

At once a voice arose among

 

    The bleak twigs overhead

 

In a full-hearted evensong

 

    Of joy illimited;

 

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

 

    In blast-beruffled plume,

 

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

 

    Upon the growing gloom.

 

 

 

So little cause for carolings

 

    Of such ecstatic sound

 

Was written on terrestrial things

 

    Afar or nigh around,

 

That I could think there trembled through

 

    His happy good-night air

 

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

    And I was unaware.

 

So come on, brothers and sisters, to arms for 2013. As Shelley insisted, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Our plumage is indeed blast-beruffled, some of us more than others, but frail, gaunt and small as we are we’ll bloody well fling our souls upon the growing gloom for another 12 months, eh? Happy new year!