A new year. A fresh start. An opportunity to correct some of the bad habits that you’ve picked up over the past 12 months. Compilers of obscure statistics found that as many as nine out of ten people who make new year’s resolutions fall by the wayside within a month. Mark Twain nutshelled this: “Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds.”
First, though, you have to recover from Hogmanay. This does not apply if you are under the age of 35 of course. Congratulations youngster: you are still in the Teflon zone, where a hangover can be shifted with two Ibuprofen, a massive hot buttery and a cold bottle of Irn-Bru. Later, as you head towards the higher numbers, that Teflon constitution will turn to Shellac: fat and sugar will no longer work their magic, and a big brassy Hogmanay night may leave you washed up in bed, sobbing, retching and begging your partner to finish you off with a shovel.
Of all the areas in which modern Scots excel (chippies, songs about wellies, sectarianism, heart disease, recipes for shortbread), Hogmanay is the one in which we excel the very most. Some cynics have suggested that this is because we celebrate Hogmanay as a pagan festival, and it certainly goes further back than Christianity. Perhaps it’s the sense that the divide between ourselves and others has been relaxed for the day, and damp-nosed strangers can embrace for the day and pour Scotch over each other. To me, Hogmanay feels like a blind date with Scotland. There’s a bit of jittery anticipation beforehand, you dress up a little too much, and at midnight there’s a headlong plunge into some alarming kissing.
Even the most rubbish Hogmanay is at least memorable. Mine was 1989-90 in George Square, when Glasgow celebrated becoming the year’s City of Culture with an open air concert that included the saxophonist Tommy Smith entertaining the crowds with solos of a length that could allow you to go to a nearby corner shop, invest in top-up bottle and still be back in time for the drummer’s turn. That year they even mucked up the bells, and our host Robbie Coltrane was still doing his stand-up routine when the countdown and the chimes began. Even so, my inner Scot cries out that this is how Hogmanay should be, a grand excuse for adventure, unpredictability and wandering around at night. Two tectonic plates grind up against each other: a profound but unspoken recognition of time’s passing, and the indigenous urge to capitalise hugely on a city-wide amnesty on drunkenness while balancing traffic cones on our heads.
Hogmanay is to the Scots what the summer solstice is to pagans: the reason for the other 364 days in the year. Originally, a traditional Hogmanay celebration doubled as a mopping up operation. Armed with coal and black bun, it gave permission to ramble around the locality helpfully polishing off the neighbours’ leftover Christmas cake and turkey. In some places, however, the night has evolved and become commoditised into mini-festivals with locked-off ticketed streets, overwhelmed tourists freezing at the top of Ferris wheels and giant outdoor stages showcasing pop groups who last had a hit when Tony Blair was playing guitar in No 10. The passing of 2,000 years is one way to measure time. Trying to walk from one end of Princes Street in Edinburgh to the other during its three-day Hogfest is another.
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A friend recalls a Hogmanay in Edinburgh at which he became friends with a young lady, enjoyed a few bottles of supermarket brandy in the Meadows, then made an unsteady retreat back to punch in the keypad code for his rented digs and crashed out in the bedroom, only to awaken on Ne’er Day with the blood-freezing realisation that he had moved out from this flat eight months ago when he finished university. Another pair of pals decided it would be romantic to see in the new year camping by a loch and watching the fireworks mirrored in the water, followed by a midnight swim in water so icy that the fish swam onto the beach and built little driftwood pyres. Groping around in the pitch black for the towels stowed in their holdall caused a tube of moisturiser to explode, covering Mr Romantic Loch’s hands in goo. Not wanting to let it go to waste, despite its strange smell, he rubbed it into his face. Of course, this was not moisturiser but Mrs Romantic Loch’s depilatory cream, so he saw in the first few weeks of the year — and his new job — with no eyebrows.
In the movies, New Year’s Eve is a reliable countdown to excitement and new chapters, but back home you may prefer to begin the new year in a more low-key style in keeping with the moral and emotional rigours of the year ahead. There’s an argument for not over-thinking it, and for not feeling guilty if you spent Hogmanay with a box set in your pyjamas.