A friend who lives on the Isle of Man, a tiny dot in the middle of the Irish Sea, comes to mind every year on what he calls “Og-u-naa” in the Manx language he pretends he can speak. To the Scots it’s Hogmanay, the last day of the year.
I’m no etymologist, but I suspect the word combines the two Old Norse words for “regret” and “shame”, the emotions provoked by post-midnight activity after an evening of excess.
This weekend I nurture a hope not to see in the New Year sporting a hangover incompatible with the dignity that should, if I had any sense, accompany my advanced years; but then I remind myself that we owe a solemn duty to history not to let the old ways die.
The custom of overdoing the festivities has outlived most other ancient traditions; does anyone go first-footing any more, outside Scotland and the podariko enthusiasts of Greece?
The first foot was a man who crossed your threshold immediately after midnight bearing gifts – a piece of coal (before it was damned as a fossil fuel), shortbread and whisky – and would set the household’s luck for the following year.
Ideally he (women were thought to bring bad luck in those unenlightened times) would be dark-haired; fair hair was said to be reminiscent of the Vikings, who were not the sort of late-night visitors a 10th-century peasant would welcome. (Not that a bunch of drunks stumbling around the streets knocking on doors and cadging drinks had much to recommend them either.)
First footing has disappeared from most of the English-speaking world; so here, instead of gulping a dozen grapes like the Spanish, or endlessly sounding car horns like the French (and the Italians, although they don’t require a special day to do so) we enjoy the fireworks broadcast around the world while Sydneysiders buy tickets to watch them live from their local harbourside parks.
It’s tempting, as the rockets burst across the sky, to sneer “there goes another couple of kidney machines,” but that’s just an old man’s cynical nonsense. The millions of fireworks dollars were never diverted from an underfunded hospital; and once you understand the money would otherwise be used to inflate some plump bureaucrat’s bonus, setting fire to it becomes much more gratifying.
But cynicism, however warm it makes you feel, is an unappealing trait, and one I have more than once attempted to shed. Sometimes I determine to be one of those cheery souls who brighten every room they enter, faces shining with fellow feeling; but the first dolt of the morning undoes my bonhomie, and the dolts seem to be getting up earlier and hanging around all day.
Make it my New Year’s resolution, did you say? As if anyone’s ever seen one work. Ambitious slimmers lose their resolve and are smuggling little bags of Maltesers by mid-January; others are scrounging cigarettes from their former smoking companions before buying “just the one” pack in February. Their resolutions are as farcical and as binding as the ones issued by the United Nations.
So farewell to abstemiousness and delusions of self-improvement: the quantity of Champagne I plan to consume will be heroically inappropriate (my 2022 word of the year, for oh so many unmentionable reasons); thence I will eventually pass into the warm world of cognac and armagnac, guided by my dear friend Brian, an adept in the mysteries of what he disarmingly terms “brown drink”.
The hangover will arrive as assuredly as the New Year, but this time I’m ready for it, and am already steeling myself to do better in 2024.
Diverse portrait of key moments in time
This latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, named for Cezanne and Giacometti, highlights the unbreakable bond between art and history.
How to fail spectacularly at unboxing
It was four boxes, not one; the ASMR was dire; and completion took more than four hours: a shambolic unboxing.