Edel Coffey: When every year feels like a gift, the least I can do is stay up to welcome the year in
Edel Coffey: I will welcome in the new year in the same way as I have done every year since my children were born. Picture: Ray Ryan
I’ve never been a New Year’s Eve person. In my mind it’s second only to St Patrick’s Day for the kind of chaotic Bacchanalian behaviour that descends on the country. I prefer to avoid that kind of unpredictability. And then there’s all of that ‘new year, new you’ guff to take on board. A sense of obligation to take yourself in hand. Even if you’re perfectly content with your life, it’s hard to resist the temptation to impose a new plan on the blank slate of an unblemished year stretching out in front of you. All that potential just waiting to be shaped.
This year will be different; this year will be better; this year will be the year; the year of you; the year you achieve everything you’ve always dreamed of. It’s a sort of madness really. We go out on New Year’s Eve and then start the new year feeling under the weather, slightly blue, and demotivated. It’s no way to do it. It puts us on the back foot.
