Good Or Shit: Happy New Year

Out the corner of my eye, partly obscured by the sopping-wet hood covering my head from the pouring rain, I saw the headlights of a car slowing down beside me as I walked down a dark street.

“Do you know where you're going?” the driver asked, in a tone which indicated he knew full well I didn't.

“No. And that's the problem with your damn country,” I railed. “You spend so much time underground that when you find yourself up out here, you have no bloody sense of direction!”

He smiled at me. “Get in, I'll drive you home.”

At 4am on the morning of Christmas Eve, for the very first time in my life I was driven home by the police. And all I can say is thank god January has arrived. I feel as though I have emerged from some kind of supernatural vortex brought about by an alignment of stars and moons and planets and gods, which begins right about the time the council finishes putting up the Christmas decorations in the streets. An inexplicable December phenomenon, compelling you to get uncharacteristically drunk more often than you would at any other time of the year. Untamed, unrestrained, mania.

As soon as the dust settled and the New Year shone through, I felt like I was looking out over a wasteland scattered with wreckage. Endless nights of raging through pubs and bars and clubs. “We'll just go for one” turning into one bar after another as the closing times chased us. Singing all the songs from The Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, South Pacific and My Fair Lady, at the top of my lungs, over whiskey, in a pub with my manager. Warehouse parties held by friends and crashing those of strangers. Harassing a DJ at my work Christmas party until he agreed to play, for some reason, Ginuwine's Pony. And so much dancing. I have ballroom danced and belly danced and I flooded one party with the sound of the Eurythmics until it was only my housemate and I still dancing. And then after a while just me – but with complete reckless abandon.

It's a bit like that Charlene song only a tad less classy – Oh I've been to Nice and the isle of Greece, Where I sipped champagne on a yacht, I moved like Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed 'em what I've got, I've been undressed by kings and I've seen some things, That a woman ain't 'sposed to seeeeeeeeeee, I've been a crazy bitch in the lead up to New Year's Eve.

I've never really cared much about New Year's Eve. I've never made resolutions to get skinny, or quit smoking, or declare that this year is going to be the year I finish my novel. But perhaps that was just the innocence of youth. Being under the naive impression that life is long. That you've got loads of time to become a rock star while completing your arts-law degree before you save the world with a blockbuster film about human rights which you write, produce and direct yourself.

But now, I am in the last few months of my twenties and, like some kind of death knell, mortality is making itself apparent. My hangovers have turned into unbearably agonising ordeals only sleeping all day will save me from; I have to sit right up close to my computer screen and hold books right up to my face to stop the words from doing this annoying little shaking thing; the silver threads in my hair are multiplying faster than guinea pigs; I'm experiencing a sexual awakening that brings terror to my boyfriend's eyes; and to top it all off the visa that allows me to work in the UK is about to expire and I have some major decisions to make about the life that is fast getting away from me.

Is it any wonder I keep finding myself dancing in a gay-bar in a basement in Soho at 4am, before getting lost three blocks from my house – three blocks – and attracting the attention of a policeman who then feels the need to drive me home?

The significance of New Year, the essence of what turns December into an orgiastic festival of Dionysus, is this unshakeable sense of ending. The death of a pocket of time. It's like you're casually going up an escalator and you just happen to look across and spot a year of your life on the other escalator, but going down, heading for the exit. Finished. Not that many more to go.

It was the Romans who moved New Year from March to January, which just happens to be the month named after Janus, the god with two faces – one looking to the past, the other looking to the future. One looks at what you have and haven't accomplished, the other looks toward your hopes and dreams.

December is a juncture marking the move from one phase to the next. It sends us wild. Causes us to unleash as if we're going to die tomorrow. We carry on like Pagans in a ritual, making offerings and sacrifices to the gods in the hope that as the new year unwraps itself, revealing all its as yet unknown possibilities, it will be either just as good, or much better than the last one. And as the new one begins, like a spell broken, that urge to rage uncontrollably dissipates. We begin to focus, to plan. With defiance and trepidation we step out into a New Year to see what the gods have in store for us.