NYE: Still overbooked, overpriced and overhyped

SO how was it for you? Any good stuff? Or is it all going straight to the charity shop? Never mind.

Only 360 shopping days until next December 25! Hopefully by then, your so-called loved ones will have figured out that household utensils or perfume endorsed by someone off Take Me Out is not really what you want from Santa. Or anyone.

Never mind. At least now all that industrial mince pie and factory turkey palaver is out of the way, you can focus on the biggest night of the year, New Year’s Eve. What could be more fun? Apart from Christmas shopping for your most difficult relative at 5pm on December 24.

New Year’s Eve. Who can we blame for that? Who decided that the best possible way to mark the transition from one horrid freezing winter month to the next would be to go out wearing as little as possible — shirt sleeves for him, shiny bandage and stilts for her — and stand 10 deep at a bar that is selling Jagerbombs for 10 times their normal price, having been charged a walletful just to elbow your way through the door in the first place?

The only thing that’s free on New Year’s Eve is chlamydia. Everything else is overbooked, overhyped and overpriced. Bars and pubs are rammed with crying girls in glittery make-up and vomiting boys in Superdry T-shirts. Outside, it’s fight club. Street scenes so Hogarthian you wonder if you aren’t actually time travelling, were it not for the presence of glowing high-visibility police uniforms on every corner.

There is nowhere to take refuge, which is why you end up paying the cost of a Ryanair flight to go into a nightclub you would normally avoid like herpes — perhaps somewhere with a name like Krazyees — where a drunk person will be playing the worst kind of chart rubbish to a heaving mass of more drunk people.

Then, at midnight, everyone will shout out numbers backwards from 10, like you do before surgery, and grope, snog, lurch and manhandle each other.

But God forbid you want to leave. You will have the same chance of being included on the next manned mission to Mars as you do finding a taxi. Long queues of half-dressed goosebumpy drunks will be jostling and staggering, and being quoted three figures to take them a mile up the road — if they can provide a written guarantee in advance that their massive alcohol intake and propensity for travel sickness will not merge all over their new trainers in the back of the cab as it pulls away from the kerb.

Probably best to just stay in, eh? After all, what could be better than watching Jools Holland count in the New Year once again — like he does every single year, like Groundhog Day – while finishing off the Baileys and those furry bits of Terry’s Chocolate Orange you found stuck under the cushion. Happy 2014. No, really.