Staying up to see in the new year is a lot of old hogwash

Once upon a time, I would stay up late for more or less anything. A party, of course, and nightclubbing – can you imagine?! If people were going back to someone’s room at uni, just for more chat, I’d be there. A late dinner after post-work drinks? Count me in. The evening’s final screening at the cinema? Why not. Whereas most of my friends had the sense to “give this one a miss” from time to time, my FOMO (fear of missing out) would inevitably kick in, and I’d be determined to kick on into the small hours. One more drink? Go on then...

Nowadays you might struggle to tempt me out to a sweaty nightclub, but if you were offering up a nightcap at a dusky private members’ club, I’d almost certainly be unable to resist. And while I could probably live without a raucous house party, if some pals come round for what the old Chipping Norton set might call a “kitchen supper”, I’ll be the one urging them not to leave just yet when midnight approaches. Likewise, when I’m at their house, you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll be me outstaying my welcome and agreeing that, yes, opening another bottle of wine would be just the thing. Even when left to my own devices, I’ll probably still be scrolling through Twitter/X or checking the latest cricket scores late into the night.

Yet there is one occasion that proves the exception to the rule. When everyone else is getting roused up to see in the new year with hard liquor, fireworks and “Auld Lang Syne”, I will – if at all possible – be nowhere to be seen, unless you happen to be looking in my bed. Weirdo.

When I was a kid, we used to spend New Year’s Eve with my best friend and his family. We ate well, played charades... it was an annual highlight. Sometimes we probably stayed till midnight, but I don’t recall that being a necessary element of the evening, and given that we were young, it’s just as likely that we were taken home rather earlier.

When I was an older teenager, there was the odd year when someone might have a free house in which we could gather, and that was fun. But when friends suggested going to London, I couldn’t have imagined anything worse than being crammed in with thousands of strangers, wondering whether the done thing would be to kiss whoever happened to be standing next to me at midnight. Once I’d moved to London, I kept the front door firmly shut come 31 December.

Maybe it’s because the whole New Year’s Eve thing seems so cultish – and also, by virtue of the singing, so Scottish. I love the Scots, and there is a bit of Macalister in me somewhere, but when it’s a bunch of middle-class southerners reciting/bowdlerising Rabbie Burns, it rather sticks in the craw.

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was regularly giving the whole thing a miss. Champers at home, a deux, then bed by 11 at the latest was just right, and I felt I had set a course for life.

And yet, we now find ourselves being dragooned into staying up late by our children, who have realised that the tradition of seeing in the first moments of 1 January offers an excuse for a late bedtime. And there is no budging them. The prospect of Rick Astley on BBC One was never going to make them give up on their ambitions, and it probably wouldn’t be right to leave them in the sole care of their grandmother downstairs while we depart for our beauty sleep.

The upshot, then, is that despite it all being a lot of hogwash, we’ll be Hogmanaying the night away with the kids once again, hoping against hope that most of the evening can at least be taken up with a film or a quiet board game. As for my new year’s resolution for 2024? To think of reasons during the next 12 months for not having to stay up next New Year’s Eve.