not with a bang

It's just as well that we weren't planning on going to a glamorous New Year's Eve party tonight, or any sort of a party at all, and that I am not a fan of New Year resolutions, since by this morning the nagging sense I'd had since before Christmas that I might be going down with something had coagulated into a full blown certainty, in the form of one streaming nostril and a pulsing headache on that side of the head.  A cold.

As I lay in bed this morning trying to summon the energy to get up, and looking ill enough to prompt the Systems Administrator to enquire what I usually gave the chickens for breakfast, Radio 5 Live (my new morning radio squeeze since the Today programme became so moany) was running a listeners' straw poll on plans for New Years Eve.  We seemed to be in the majority in having no plans to go out.  It's never been my favourite party night.  I distrust manufactured sentiment, and a mere date is incapable of bearing all the expectations thrust upon it for everyone to have a Good Time.  I often struggle to stay awake until midnight anyway.  Besides, nobody has invited us to a party.  I don't think any of our friends who live relatively close by are giving parties, any more than we are, and it isn't a night to be on the roads if you can avoid it.

As for the New Year, it looks as though pruning the grape vine, trickling oxalic acid on the bees and all those other tasks which I've been meaning to do imminently for the past week will just have to wait a few more days.  So will losing the post Christmas excess weight, tidying my desk, filing my tax return, kick-starting my fledgling journalistic career, seeing the Moroni exhibition before it shuts, making contact with the friends who have exchanged kind words by card and email over the Christmas period, and all the other aspects of self-renewal and reinvention which I might have put on the list of resolutions if I had one.

So that was 2014, creeping to a snotty conclusion, and in six and three quarter hours it will be 2015, full of endless possibilities, one family wedding that I know about, and at least one general election.  I expect I'll have gone to bed well before then, but by about the sixth of January I should be looking forward to it.