columninches
New Year is in some ways a bigger deal in Scotland than Christmas. Jesus's birthday is just a warm-up: Hogmanay is the real thing; Coke to Christmas's Pepsi; heroin to its methadone. More drunken, more rowdy, and less cluttered with dull Christian iconography, it's the best kind of celebration: centred around an entirely meaningless premise - the change of digits - it epitomises the true spirit of partying-for-the-sake-of-partying.
It's beginning to worry me, therefore, that I have as yet no plans for this New Year. No invitations to cross-dressing parties, no hot dates with random men: the prospect of a night at home with my parents looms ever nigher. An evening spent in front of the TV, watching The Old Highland Marching Band play all forty-three verses of Flower of Scotland, while my stepmother tells me I should cut down on my drinking as a New Year resolution. Maybe not.
Actually, though, this seems fairly unlikely: unlike Christmas, which follows a set routine every year (Stockings, church, lunch, and ritual unconsciousness while my gran washes up and looks faintly martyred) our New Year tends to be fairly random and last minute. Something will be happening, but until fifteen minutes before, God knows what. And even then, the evening tends to end up as a scrambled affair, rushing to and fro in the pursuit of pleasure, feeling obscure terror that someone, somewhere, may be having a better time than you are.
The question of what to do at Hogmanay is more heated this year than it is normally, though. Much as I scorn millenium-fever, and much as I enjoy being pedantic and pointing out that strictly speaking the whole thing doesn't start until 2001, it's difficult to avoid feeling some slight pressure to have the Best Night Ever. My friend Ruth, for example, usually holds a house party on New Year's Eve. This year, however, she's decided that it would be nice for us all to climb the hill behind her house, drink brandy and watch for the first dawn of the new century. In Inverness, this would be. In December.
I find this worrying: I'd planned to see in 2000 wearing something glittery and festive, with tasteful hints of cleavage and thigh. Shall I instead greet the next thousand years clad in a parka and woolly gloves? Glamour is important at New Year. Particularly as I firmly believe in the dictum that says whatever you're doing at the stroke of midnight will affect the nature of the following year. Of course, I saw the beginning of 1999 through an alcoholic haze in the basement of my ex's house, playing Strip Spin the Bottle with Ruth, the ex, and five strange boys. Read that as you will.
I suppose, though, that it doesn't really matter what you're doing at the stroke of midnight this year, given that by all accounts the world will end some thirty seconds later. That'll be one of the benefits of Ruth's hill: we should get a good view of the Apocalypse, when the fires break out across the globe, the earth splits in twain and the dead rise up, in accordance with the holy teachings of the divine Book of Revelation. Or, alternatively, when the millenium bug kicks in, and the world is plunged into a new dark age. Always assuming such a scenario, though, I can tell you exactly where I'll be. I shall be up on our roof with a sniper rifle, keeping the panicking hordes at bay. While dressed in a sparkly slip-dress. There's glamour for you.
18th Nov 1999