Roundabout
MacTavish, Go Home
By K ATHARINE WHITEHORN
For a start, it is far too soon after Christmas. Either you are already exhausted by Christmas, and New Year's Eve throws you completely; or You have recovered over Christmas from pre- vious exertions, arid New Year's Eve puts you right back where you were. The one really dubious result of the Union of the Parliaments seems to be this union of the festivals; I am told that the thing is now becoming as bad the other WaY round, and that the Scots are increasingly Making a fuss about Christmas, in which case they have my sympathy. To date, at least, they have New Year's Day on which to recover e "What's Hogmanay, Daddy?" "People being sick on the pavements in Glasgow" But at least, in Scotland, with first-footing a neighbourly habit, New Year's Ex e has a friend- liness about it which it lacks in England. Here, IS a rootless, cruel occasion. The one common denonlinator is that everyone must have a good -and there is no harsher way of underlining the loneliness of lonely people. At Christmas, of 4,Cntirse, one also has this determination to have fun; but at least it is accompanied by a built-in iniPer ttive to cluster round one's grandmother, take in orphans and visiting airmen, and give colonial students material for an unkind para- graPh in their autobiographies. There is no such fCeling about New Year's Eve: in fact my int-. pressi m is that the determination to be asked out is now stronger th'in the urge to entertain, so that all the people who are not giving parties feel bad about not being asked by all the other people who are not giving parties. People do not talk about New Year's Eve plans as they do about Chris mas, because of the dark fear of not having anY; in America you feel miserable if you are not going out on a Saturday night, and English tslew Year is all the Saturday nights rolled into
one.
About seven years ago I spent a New Year's
ve all by myself; it was the most bitterly lonely eveni tg of my life, and made even worse by the knowledge that, in a last-minute attempt to whip uP some company, I had advertised my state to every me 1 knew—everyone with a telephone, anyw (soniety. Since then I have been at some Pains
times undignified pains) to make sure it
never happened again; but it would be wrong to nip+.
Y that I have strenuously enjoyed myself. I
do not merely mean that there have been times when one had to haul one's escort out of the punchbowl by his heels or restrain oneself from gagging someone else's husband explaining about Dostoievsky at two in the morning; these are risks one can run at any time. I do not even mean that one's chances of being run over, trodden on or kissed by drunks are worse on New Year's Eve than at any other time (though it is an odd fact that for three years running on New Year's Eve some stranger has insisted on telling me for how many years he lived with his wife before he married her: surely the ulti- mate conversational vulgarity). It is the fact of having to have a good lime that makes the occasion so extremely hard to enjoy; for the same reasons that make people burn the simplest food when entertaining well-known eaters, or quarrel fiercely on anniversaries.
The effect of the New Year on papers, radio and television I deplore with some diffidence, since (a) even the best papers indulge in it, and (b) it is a splendid way of giving journalists (including me) an easy Christmas or a spot of extra cash : since in making unreliable predic- tions for 1961 or choosing the Theatre of the Year, Cat of the Year, Stationery Office Educa- tional Pamphlet of the year, no extra work is needed. I cannot help feeling, though, that from the outsider's point of view only the first one or two he reads can be amusing. Perhaps the solu- tion would be for papers to ballot for the priv- ilege of doing 1960, as press photographers ballot for the privilege of doing royal occasions. I sup- pose the New Year Honours are unavoidable-- without them too many spectacular achievements would go unrewarded, such as proving that it is possible to build a store bigger than Harrods, or even, that one can work with railway food for thirty-live years and still thrive. But this year they slid the honours list back a day (presumably so as not lo miss seeing it written out three times in the Guardian—front page, London letter, leader— no Sunday paper could do as much); it should be a simple matter to take it back a few days further and call it the Christmas Honours: Compulsory enjoyment, of course, is not some- thing of which Britain has a monopoly. But I think those countries score whose day of national jollification is in the summer; on Bastille Day or the Fourth of July things happen in the open air, and anyone can go along and watch. Trafalgar Square at midnight on December 31, however, is hardly a place you want to go alone, even when icicles arc not actually forming on the lions.
And what, of all things, follows the wet, windy and bitter ushering out of the old year? The ushering in of the new, with a further two months of wet, windy and bitter winter to follow. A new year that actually began when spring seemed a feasible possibility .could--if not treated as an occasion for alcoholics synonymous with having a Good Time—be a heartening spring festival, as Easter sometimes is when it settles on a good date. Why not amalgamate Easter, the New Year and, if it comes to that, the tax year into a real New Year around the beginning of March or April, refuse all late pub licences south of the border for December 31, and give us another holiday in the autumn to bridge the long gap between the August Bank Holiday and Christ- mas? Then all we need to do is to storm the Palace on an August Bank Holiday, and we're home.
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