New Year’s Eve can be a melancholy time. If you look back at the news of the past 12 months, it’s easy to think things are getting worse.
War continues in Ukraine, Israel is still bombing Gaza and a peace deal looks as far off as ever.
We said goodbye to the Tories, but Labour has yet to cheer anyone up.
Stormont is still running, though its achievements are hard to quantify.
Assad was deposed, but we’ve another run of Trump at the White House.
It’s not hard to see why New Year’s Eve divides people. There are those who detest the whole Auld Lang Syne stuff, preferring to go to bed well before midnight and wake up in the new year without any fanfare.
And there are those who see it as a chance to have another party to liven up the post-Christmas gloom before January kicks off, when it’s cold and pay day is a long way off.
I like it now, mainly because it’s no longer a Scottish fest when you had to endure an evening’s entertainment with Andy Stewart in a kilt on one channel or Kenneth McKellar in a kilt on the other side.
This was leavened only by the appearance of Moira Stewart – not the newsreader, but a well-upholstered chanteuse in a tartan sash who sang about lassies wandering through the glen.
Then there’d be some Scots comedian yo-hoing “Jimmy, where’s your troozers”.
And that, children, is what used to pass as viewing fun, before Jools Holland and his mates took over on the last night of the year.
When the Caledonian childhood passed, there came the years of trying to find a decent venue to see in the new year – and Belfast during the Troubles didn’t offer much.
There was the Celebrity Club (beside C&A) or The Pound, and later the Queen’s Common Room, where you had to be there by 6pm to get a table, so were barely upright by midnight.
One year saw a party in our first ever house. It was a roaring success until the toilet blocked and we later found out that the sewer pipes of the 100-year-old property weren’t connected to the main drains.
Having a plumber for a brother-in-law proved to be handy – not for the first time. Though I was glad to be at my nice, clean newspaper office that particular January 1.
Checking up on the New Year babies – even with a hangover – was a lot easier than digging out the sewers.
The following New Year’s Eve saw the arrival of the first-born of our trio, and the end of boozy partying for quite a few years.
His tenth birthday coincided with the millennium, which must rank as the most over-hyped event ever.
The media fixated on the so-called “millennium bug” which was apparently going to cause Armageddon. The fear stemmed from the theory that when the clock struck midnight on January 1 2000, computer systems, which represented years in two digits, omitting the century, would malfunction.
There was talk of traffic lights not working, planes falling from the sky, power outages across the globe, nuclear rockets being accidentally launched, hospital equipment failing, people being locked in by automatic doors.
IT engineers became temporary superheroes, and simple advance planning meant the crisis was averted.
But everyone somehow got caught up in millennium madness. The papers were full of stories about Londoners earning fortunes by offering baby-sitting at rates of up to £1,000 an hour, or renting out their houses to revellers at extortionate rates.
None of it actually came to pass. My 10-year-old son was found sitting on the stairs after midnight struck. “It’s not special. It’s just like every other year,” he wept.
It was his first lesson in not falling for hype. Maybe that’s why he became a data scientist, convinced only by facts. Happy New Year.