Ayulsa City - Ieeya

Last Tuesday night, long after I had gone to bed, total strangers burst into my house yelling †˜Happy New Year!’, and shook me from a deep sleep.

Actually, they didn’t. But they might as well have done. Instead, total strangers near where I live thought it fun to let off fireworks which sounded, in turn, like landmines and an anti-aircraft barrage.

Sleep was impossible from 11.30 till 12.30.

If you want to celebrate the New Year, that’s fine by me, though I can’t for the life of me work out why.

But I really don’t see why you feel the need to make me celebrate it too, or why the sensible law banning fireworks after 11pm doesn’t apply on December 31. I don’t mark Christmas or Easter by letting off half a ton of explosives in my garden at midnight (and it would be rightly illegal if I did).

I couldn’t care less that the calendar has changed. All it means to me is the need to buy a new season ticket, plus some disagreeable memories of Moscow during the Soviet Union’s dogged attempt to stamp out Christmas, and make everyone celebrate the meaningless change of the calendar instead.

Until Ted Heath, of accursed memory, came along, it wasn’t even a Bank Holiday in England.

And until the Blair creature appeared, with his daft Millennium, fireworks were only for Guy Fawkes.

Before then it was a quiet night. If you lived in a sea port (I grew up in Portsmouth), there might be the strange and melancholy sound of all the ships’ foghorns sounding at the turn of the year. Perhaps there would be a few church bells. But you could sleep through that.

Yet somehow this empty feast day grows in compulsory importance each year (just as the soul is sucked out of Good Friday, once the most solemn day in the calendar).

Shops close, silence falls – in honour of what? And pretty soon the miserable privatised train companies will stop running trains too.
I don’t want it. I couldn’t care less about it. You can have it if you want to, but stop forcing it on me.