GIVE ME A BREAK:THERE ARE people who love New Year's Eve and pull out all the stops with parties and get-togethers, and then there are those of us who try to make it like any other night and are asleep by 12.15am, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
I’m in the latter category, but on New Year’s Eve 1999 I did go to a family party. We were huddled together – several families with young children and teenagers – waiting for the world to end. Everyone had their children with them, not just because of the cost of babysitters but because we wanted our children with us just in case. I remember sitting on a sofa surrounded by three young children and when the bell for 2000 was tolled, we parents secretly feared aircraft would fall out of the sky because anything with a microchip would stop working and economic Armageddon would arrive.
The optimists among us were still enjoying Tony Blair’s election and seeing it as a sign of better things to come, but how naive we were, believing that a British premier who was actually good-looking would make a difference. Or that rising property prices were undoubtedly a good thing. Little did we know that economic Armageddon was scheduled for a decade later, just in time for New Year’s Eve 2009.
So how will we be feeling as the noughties end? Some people like to call the second decade of the 21st century the “teens”, but going from the naughty years straight into the teen years is like going from the frying pan into the fire.
A child born on New Year’s Day will in future forever recite her birthday as “one-one-twenty-ten”, and her life expectancy, if she looks after herself and the health system looks after her, could see her alive and well as she celebrates 2100 – which people might then call “twenty-one”, because “two thousand one hundred” is a bit of a mouthful.
I won’t be around then, so how will I know, unless I perfect the art of haunting, which reminds me of why on New Year’s Eve I want to be snuggled up in bed with a distracting book rather than counting down the years.
I don’t want to think about all the years marching on in a century that I won’t see the end of.
New Year’s Eve is for the young, who are still at the stage when their lives are ahead of them.
Remember that feeling of being a teenager with decades stretching before you when anything was possible? Except that it never quite felt like that for us, did it? And teenagers, today more than ever, seem to feel anxious, rather than optimistic, about the future.
Being unable to walk straight into a job after they finish their education is on their minds quite a lot, but that argument holds only if life is about having a job. People in their late teens and early 20s actually have a tremendous opportunity due to the very lack of a sure thing in the jobs market. Having to be creative and to survive by your own ingenuity is bound to lead to a more interesting life.
It all means, of course, that we parents are going to be funding them for far longer than we had originally intended as they stretch out their education with internships and post-graduate degrees and part-time jobs.
True economic independence, these days, seems to dawn at around the age of 28, from my observation.
Ten years ago, people in that age group would have expected to put a down-payment on a house, but now they face renting in perpetuity. Few expect to get married until they are in their mid-30s as their discovery years stretch from birth to 35. Looking ahead on New Year’s Eve, 18-year-olds who worry that there’s a better party elsewhere, may have no idea that they are probably looking ahead in the next decade to two or three relatively long-term relationships, to life in several countries, to jobs that they cannot imagine now.
So many parents are older now when they have children, that people who will turn 30 in the next decade could easily have 65- and 70-year-old parents who they may find themselves asked to look after sooner than they thought, as pensions deflate.
In the 1990s and the noughties, people in their 30s with young children became sandwiched between caring for parents and caring for young children.
In the next decade and beyond, more and more people won’t even be sandwiched. They’ll be having babies and caring for elderly parents simultaneously. This could lead to interesting new ways of living as retired parents increasingly become childminders in multi-generational family units, so that people find that the old ways of living, where several generations share a roof, is more cost-effective.
Or perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part.
For me, the teens, or whatever you want to call them, will be the decade when my children start to spread their wings and leave home, and I’m not ready for that yet.
Those of us who don’t like to celebrate New Year’s Eve, perhaps, don’t like thinking of our children’s exciting new world spinning without us.