It is New Year’s Eve and the most exciting thing I have planned is my Tesco delivery. All three of my children are going to various parties and I am on chauffeuring duty for my youngest who has a house party to go to. I wonder if the parents realise they are going to be besieged by sixteen and seventeen year olds or whether they are going out themselves. It’s my son’s seventeenth birthday next week and I am waiting for the “can I have a few friends over?” request. It never is a few but I don’t mind, as long as nobody is vomiting. Unfortunately once they reach sixteen it’s not really a party unless someone is sick, for some reason is it usually one of the girls. I’d rather them all be safe at my house or, preferably somebody else’s, than hanging around somewhere. My son knows no hanging around allowed!

I have never really enjoyed New Years’s Eve. To be honest, I find it a little depressing. My friends would persuade me to go to the to the pub as a teenager and there would invariably be creepy men demanding a kiss at midnight. In 1992 my now-husband and I went to a NYE ball when on a skiing trip in Colorado and I even managed to be miserable there. I seem to remember everyone (well, the women) wearing taffeta dresses while I was in an itchy angora jumper and ski-pants having not known where we were going. So much for last minute, vague arrangements. I have never worn ski-pants again – the only person ever to have looked good in them is Audrey Hepburn. The last time we went out for NYE was about three years ago to friends for dinner. Usually my husband stays up to watch proceedings on the television and I try to be asleep before midnight but there are usually loud fireworks gong off in somewhere in our village. Even my parents, nearly ninety years old, have more fun than me, going to their neighbour’s house for drinks and nibbles.

I pop round to my parents’ house and give them a hand with a few bits around the house, my mum seems a little confused as to who I am at one point. I then send my daughter off to her party with a bottle of prosecco and settle down to watch Suspicion, a 1941 Hitchcock thriller with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.  I can’t say I am suffering from FOMO, it is blowing a gale outside and I am quite happy to have a sedate transition into 2024. It has been a somewhat difficult year what with my dad’s heart attack and my mother-in-law’s recent long hospital stay but we are still all here and that is something to be grateful for.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash