It's a Dad's Life/Adam Brophy:New Year's Eve is an adult celebration. We give the kids everything else: Easter, Christmas, Halloween, but there's nothing in New Year's Eve that appeals to the young ones.
Well, it does appeal to Young Ones, ie those still equipped to party until dawn and not be so filled with angst and self-loathing the following day that every oncoming bus looks like a potential way out. And I don't mean a one-way ticket to Bray. Although that, in itself, would be akin to what I am referring to.
Being in your 30s and having kids makes New Year's Eve a living tease.
The memory of how it used be is still fresh enough to make the night desirable, yet distant enough to have rubbed away the rough edges. From this vantage point the Temple of Sound in the Ormond Hotel on NYE in the mid-1990s has taken on a mythical elegance to rival the Hacienda in Manchester.
The Hacienda itself, when I did visit it, was nowhere near the bastion of dance culture that all music magazines had painted it to be. But I'm still glad I was there and, in my own mind, see myself as part of the rave movement, chilling with the Happy Mondays as the music took control.
That, like my positively adjusted memories of those idyllic final nights of the year, is what historians refer to as revisionism.
If I try really hard I can feel how cold it was waiting on St Stephen's Green for three hours to get a taxi home. I can smell the sweat at the bar as I wrestle myself to the front for the pleasure of forking out double the usual for the usual, having done the same at the door.
I can still get a slight tingle of embarrassment at feigning enthusiasm while hugging near-strangers at midnight just because everyone else is doing it, and they seem genuine.
Were they? Somehow I doubt it. Most of all, I can feel the combined forces of energy in the room at the after-club party as everyone wills this night to be different, better than every other Friday or Saturday in the year.
So much effort put into the creation of a myth.
For the last few years I have welcomed January 1st in the comfort of a farmhouse with the wind whipping in off the south-west coast threatening to knock the electricity off any time it should choose to do so.
If we can, we squeeze in a couple of celebratory pints in the village, but we get home before nine because the babysitter has to get out herself.
Every realist bone in my body is relieved to be out of the maelstrom taking place in all urban centres around the country. I am content to bake in the glow of a wood fire and to count down with RTÉ, exchanging muted toasts and sincere well wishes with my nearest and dearest while quaffing a quality red.
The last few years I have assured myself this is what I want, but the truth is that this, once again, is what the kids dictate. You can't kidnap a babysitter on this one night, so we do the best we can.
What we manage is a damn fine alternative, but the animal in me comes to the fore and rattles the bars of his cage every Christmas. He doesn't want the Hennessy ad, all orange glow and warmth; he wants the alcopop ad, strobe lights and party people. He is willing to forego the embezzlement committed by vintners and promoters because at some level he has still bought into the dream that this is the night anything can happen.
But by the next morning my desire is replaced by relief. I am usually woken by a plastic bottle to the head and a demand to provide food, drink and entertainment all at once. Once again, I shelve my rock-star lifestyle aspirations for another year.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
