The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year - Ogden Nash.
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Ogden Nash wasn’t a big fan of New Year celebrations, and who can blame him. All that false cheer, bad champagne and drunken revelry are hard to take. Then there’s the endless recycling of old news and safe predictions – give me the promise of a vision any day, a panther emerging suddenly below the house, say, or the appearance of a Luas from Moycullen to Galway, with a change in Knocknacarra for the Spiddal line.
There’s always the prophecy giving the exact date of the end of the world to look forward to, predictable and dreary as the round-up of the news of the world. In general I don’t go in for New Year’s Eve, but I see the point of it for everyone else. And it’s been around, in one form or another, one month or another, almost as long as we have had fire.
Charles Lamb, in his essay, New Year’s Eve, published in 1821, claimed that “no one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.”
Adam aside, and discounting everyone before Pope Gregory set the date in stone in 1852, Lamb, like millions of others, used that pause between the death of the old year and the birth of the new to look back and take stock.
Some might use it to assess their achievements, or worse, rummage around in something called a bucket list, or plan to burn up what’s left of the planet filling a new bucket next year. Writers have usually done enough rummaging around in the past, their own or someone else’s, to benefit by that sort of annual cost analysis.
This is a miserable time of year, dark and gloomy and wet, but we know the date is arbitrary, that human beings have celebrated the life cycle of birth, growth and decay since time immemorial, that the new year has been celebrated in March, in autumn, and even in August and September.
Whatever the date we need the new year as a hinge to swing us between one cycle of time and another, a pause before life rushes on with or without us. Without such measures time, with its tricks and eddies, meanders and turnings, is tricky and far too hard to handle.
Especially at times like this when a tide is on the turn. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” as Yeats wrote in 1919.
When I was growing up the emphasis was on the Twelfth Day, Nollaig na mBan, also known as the feast of the Epiphany. Yet I’ve come to like New Year. I’ve never gone in for resolutions, believing like Mark Twain that the road to hell is paved with them. I like it because I am usually sick and tired of the old year, because the days are creeping towards spring in tiny increments and because I have chocolate.
The first New Year I celebrated found me stuck, at midnight, in an almost empty railway carriage. The train on the stroke of midnight stopped between two stations on the Sintra line. The engine was cut, and a passenger lowered a window and we leaned out, in that cold, clear Lisbon night, to listen to the cacophony of bin lids from the dormitory towns of Rio de Mouro and Mem Martins.
I didn’t know about this custom – bin lids had a different association to a young Irish girl then – and at first I was a bit nervous. Then the few passengers in the carriage wished us and one another a happy New Year and the train started up and moved on to our station.
That unplanned stop between stations was both ordinary and marvellous, a perfect pause between one year and the next for a young couple, newly arrived in another country, our lives, like the years, stretched out before us.
That year, 1979, started a habit of marking the evening, but quietly. This year I’ll read a few poems by Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, two poets who knew what it was to sing of war and hope for a just peace. Then on January 2nd, I’ll turn up at the desk and, from time to time, look down from my workroom to where the wild things are because this year there might be a panther.
Mary O’Malley is a poet and essayist. Her 10th book of poems, The Shark Nursery, is due from Carcanet in summer 2024