I am not making New Year’s Resolutions. They came with a warning on the radio, may cause mental damage. Last New Year’s Eve being almost certainly less that a year ago, I remember exactly what my resolutions were. We escaped from the party for a while (everyone asked about you this year), the kids scribbled on the cream bedroom walls with wax crayons and we got high in the black on the hill above an invisible lake. I counted them off on my fingers walking back through a deserted campus. I’m not sure how big an effect these seven promises I made out loud (and the few secret silent ones) had on my mental wellbeing. If by this time next year I am not doing anything such as sitting in a draughty attic room with my head wrapped in cling film, then this will be an improvement and it is irrefutable that the resolutions were to blame.
This year I was the sole young person floundering in a sea of the inebriated middle-aged.When Big Ben said so I ate twelve grapes, one on each chime. The Spanish did this in 1909 to solve the problem of a grape surplus, and are still doing it today. Everyone got very excited about this and forgot to swallow the grape from the previous chime before shoving in the next one with reckless abandon, and after the twelfth they fell about spluttering and spitting out little bits of grape skin. I did not like this very much, the darker hours of my childhood years having been spent perfecting the art of Magically Compressing Time Using Nothing More Than A Single Grape And My Two Wobbly Front Teeth. Stage one was pulling the membrane from the fleshy part of a large green grape with nails and teeth, which could take up the better part of an afternoon depending on size and ripeness, and stage two was keeping the remains under my tongue for as long as possible, testing both my willpower and the defenses of the naked grape. Those few seconds of what was intended to be joyous symbolic grape consumption were overshadowed by a remaining shred of childish ritual. (DO NOT SWALLOW THE CLOTHED GRAPE, a booming voice from above commanded.)
My father, momentarily blinded by the champagne cork, tripped over the coal shuttle. I flung myself at his ankles, and it was only by a mere two inches and as a result of my quick reflexes and sacrificial dive that he was saved from a firey toasting in the open fire.
This did not actually happen. I wish it had; it would have been immeasurably more exciting than his waxing lyrical about his new FiloFax and the London tube map inserts he bought for it from WHSmiths for £4.50.
