‘New Year,” wrote the English essayist Charles Lamb, “is every man’s birthday.” Well if so, seeing in the chimes of midnight on December 31 is one celebration I’m happy to forget.
Perhaps I'm getting old, for back in my mid-20s the striking of the New Year seemed an occasion full of wondrous possibilities. Parties, food, conviviality and then that lovely moment when somebody turned on the radio and we all stood, festooned in party hats and with inane grins plastered across our faces, to hear Big Ben usher in a fresh start. Cue party poppers, balloons, laughter, tears, a chorus of Auld Lang Syne, and frenzied hugging of the person nearest to you, whether you knew them or not.
But as I get older this annual shindig has lost much of its lustre. For a start, by 10pm I’m already yearning for my pyjamas and a cup of cocoa. In any case, I’ve never recovered from the occasion a few years ago when the reveller next to me at an annual beano had no sooner loosened her festive grip than she asked: “So what happened to your career, Michael? You were doing so well!” And a Happy New Year to you too, adam.
Another seasonal ritual I’ve eschewed this time is the farce of making resolutions. According to a recent poll, nearly half of all adults in the UK still compile a list each year, even though 88 per cent of those admit to breaking them all before January is out. Eat less, smoke less, join a gym, be less stressed, spend more time with the family; like loyal pets, they always come back for more, even though they’ve been betrayed each and every year for the past decade. It’s a touching, if fruitless, example of humanity’s endless capacity to prize optimism over experience. But I’m too old, too greedy and too slothful to kid myself any longer.
So perhaps just one resolution will suffice for 2016, something that really will improve the quality of my health and happiness, if only I can hold to it. Namely, to stay off Twitter.
During the past 12 months I’ve noticed (or rather, not noticed – and therein is the problem) this online social networking service quietly taking over more and more of my time. Apart from offering endless opportunities to watch clips of cats falling off shiny tables and folk blundering into glass doors, Twitter has offered me a window into the thoughts of famous people the world over, from my next door neighbour to president Barack Obama. Indeed, so deliciously insidious is it that I’ve barely realised quite how much of my time it’s been swallowing up.
The problem is, it provides the comforting if spurious sensation of having powerful friends. After all, I can now follow Mr Obama or footballer Lionel Messi. Who knows; perhaps they’ll follow me back, in which case I can offer them advice on how to fashion American foreign policy or the best way to penetrate Real Madrid’s defensive back four, and they can offer me tips on things to do while vacationing in Washington or Barcelona.
But as with that first cigarette, or that tin of chocolate biscuits in the larder, one moment you’re in control of your peccadillo then, before you know it, you’re dipping in every few minutes. During the last few weeks of 2015 I spent so much time logging onto Twitter that I’ve had a better idea of what’s happening on the other side of the world than in my own household: a fact not lost on my long-suffering wife.
Enough is enough, she’s said. A new year and a new start. She’ll allow me full and untrammeled access to the biscuit barrel and the sofa, and she’ll even allow me the odd crafty cigarette in the garden if that’s what I want, but she’s made me promise to stop vicariously rubbernecking on other people’s lives and start living my own. Quite right too. What better way to begin 2016? Why, I feel better already.
Mind you – I might just tweet this new state of affairs to Barack and Lionel before I log off. I wouldn’t want them to be wondering where I’d gone.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins
