I have lived very nearly fifty-three years and have only ever been to one New Year party. This is not because I am unpopular or a party pooper, but just a total lack of interest. January 1st just doesn't resonate with me as it always seems something of an anticlimax after Christmas, a hiatus in the middle of the Christmas celebrations interposed midway between Christmas Day itself and the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

The natural year builds towards spring and the vernal equinox. I suppose in the same way that the Christian year builds up slowly through Advent you could argue that the natural year begins with the winter solstice, but to me it seems that you watch spring growing from the shy appearance of the snowdrops and building through the glory of daffodils until that point where new year/season burgeons forth in birdsong and blossom. Well, no, it isn't a single day; it isn't even the same week each year - hardly even the same month - but it always seems to me that our ancestors had the right of it before new year was moved from March to January. Even the money men seem to have a clearer idea of the real beginning of the year than whoever it was who fixed on January 1st.

So, here in the Turner household we have our own established routine for New Year: we ignore it. Or, to be accurate, father ignores it and goes to bed sometime after eleven, but before midnight, while I will make a pot of tea as soon as I have finished writing this, then I shall turn on the televisiion long enough for Big Ben to strike, wish the cat a happy new year and go to bed with a good book (and the cat). When my grandmother was alive we children watched television with her (usually a Marx Brothers film and the White Heather Club,) and she gave us small glasses of sweet sherry to toast the new year, while my parents were with some Scottish friends at the Caledonian Society's Hogmanay Ball. But that was a long time ago, the friends went back to Scotland, and we reverted to our customary avoidance of celebrations.

I don't do resolutions either.

I think I finally gave up completely on new year celebrations when the whole world went mad and celebrated the new century and new millennium a year early, but if you think that I'm a sad git, just wait for my Twelfth Night party next Sunday.