New Years Eve
So here we areTuesday 31st December, 2013. The end of another year, and everybody seems to be wilfully entering the mass hysteria of attaching some kind of mystic importance to the rolling over of a few seconds on the clock.
Let us take a moment to remember what we invented the calendar, and weinventedthe hours of the day. We also inventedtime zones because we're not clever enough to have a universal clock that reads the same for everybody.While writing this (at 11:55am GMT), I'm aware that a few small islands out in the ocean will be approaching 2014, and the news channels will comment on it. Fireworks will be set off, and some people will think it is somehow important.
As the invented change of year number sweeps around the globe, time-zone by time-zone, countless billions of people will start making lists of the things they wish to change in their lifethe things they will stop doing, the things they will start doing. Quite why they couldn't have stopped or started all those things when it first occurred to them they should be stopping or starting is a mystery.
People will celebrate the tick of the clock as 2013 becomes 2014, and collectively follow conventionvisiting friends, eating junk, drinking themselves silly, before waking up the next day to a day that will be remarkably similar to the days before, and the days to come.
We will be visiting friends nearbynot so much because it's “New Years Eve”more because it's a good excuse to spend time together. Any excuse is a good one when youknow you don't see each other enough, because life, the universe, dogs, cats, chickens, children, and everything else gets in the way. If convention dictates we should eat, drink, and laugh together, then who are we to argue ?