New Year's Day

Even when I was a 20-nothing person who went clubbing and on wild nights out involving cocktails and handsome men, I hated New Year's Eve.
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Anywhere I would usually go would be twice as expensive and four times as busy for that night only. There always seemed to be a forced jolliness and a rather grim determination to see the New Year in with style, that usually left me with a flat feeling of failed expectations the next morning. Or a hangover.
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During 1999, millennium madness gripped the country and I remember people planning their New Year's Eve for pretty much the whole year in advance. Whoever you spoke to would ask where you were going to see in the millennium - on Sydney Harbour bridge? Up the Eiffel Tower? In a Gothic Scottish Castle? In Central London at the biggest rave ever imagined? No plan was too elaborate or ambitious.
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But by October 1999 I was a mother for the first time, and in a dark fog of utter exhaustion and bad post-natal depression. I could barely put a sentence together, let alone take my millennium baby to an all-night, alcohol fuelled party of dance and excitement.
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Then G had a wonderful idea. He suggested that as we were waking before dawn every morning anyhow, why didn't we get up when C woke, and take him up to Hampstead Heath where we would watch the dawn come up on the new year, century and millennium, looking down over London.

So that is what we did. I had expected it to be peaceful but in fact half of London had also headed up to Hampstead Heath after their night out, to watch the sun rise. G and I were the only sober people up there. I remember people cooing over C in his pushchair and toasting him with cans of beer. "Its a baby!!!" exclaimed one young woman. The picture above was taken that morning - he looks fairly bewildered by it all!

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G and I sat on a bench with C and all three of us rather blearily watched the dawn of the new millennium. London looked beautiful, crisp and clean in the morning light (and from such a distance!). We went home and invited all our friends over for some champagne to ease their New Year's Day hangovers. I was the happiest I had been in months, and so pleased that at last I had realised the best way to celebrate a new year, is on January 1st rather than December 31st.

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Today I continued my tradition and celebrated the start of 2008 by going shoe shopping with O to get her these fabulous party shoes, and then going on to see The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House together with O, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law.

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Thank you J, A and O for a really lovely start to my year.