Another year..

..around in pods texting their friends and acquaintances about what a good
time they were having. As they were on a floodlit hill in a gale wearing tee-shirts,
shorts and fluorescent wrist bands, this seems somewhat unlikely. But the
messages no doubt made their friends reply that they were having an even better
time where they were. They had that desperate uncertainty when a stubby of
beer was clasped for the whole evening as a talisman of maturity.
In all honesty, and to their credit, they were well behaved in the usual aimless
fashion of youth, drifting like flotsam and jetsam on an oily sea, when there
was no focus of activity such as a band to listen to or look at in an act
of togetherness. But, because of this absence of entertainment, they now had
an environment in which they could talk with an excellent chance of being
heard, which may have been the cause of more embarrassment and consternation
for the more sensitive youngsters.
But they were probably happy to be away from their parents’ descent
into annual amiable torpor, trying to avoid their balding and pot bellied
father them making passes at other people’s wives and leering at their
female friends. For the unfortunate many there were assorted recrimination
as to why they weren’t at the Crown Casino with a range of photogenic
nonentities that usually clutter the pages of magazines like Who, What and
Where.
When I first came to this country I was amazed at the regular New Years Eve
riots down the coast at Lorne, Anglesea or Rosebud and even made a special
trip to see one, but apparently it was happening in the next town along that
year. There is a vast troubling and ongoing undercurrent of violence in Australia,
but these annual events seemed more like the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
An initiation in group bravado and stupidity where strangely few people get
hurt. In all likelihood better than Pamplona where 15 people have died and
over 200 been seriously injured since 1924.
This generation seems entirely more modest and sensible that ours and those
that preceded it. Certainly there are the usual rat bags, but we be seeing
the first generation who are genetically engineered accountants, consultants
and salespeople.
We are enjoined to have a great time at New Year when, probably like Christmas,
people feel annoyed, stressed, and unhappy. In most cases there is a discrepancy
between the year as it was and the year as it was imagined to be.
And there is the realisation that more promises and resolutions will be made
to be mostly unrealised. The promise of the year is like the promise of youth.
In a world where there are A, B and C Lists most of us have fallen off the
back of the alphabet of celebrity and notoriety.
We end up with the people that we know too well who reflect the people we
have become. In many ways this is a comfort but also a mirror that reflects
us aging through the years that they wear with varying degrees of grace and
frailty. The evening reflects how comfortable we are with and our unfulfilled
dreams.
Secretly many of carry a forlorn hope that there will be the Pumpkin phone
call and we will be transported to the end of year party where we will be
feted for our wit, charm and good looks and talent. Beautiful women and handsome
men will gather around, hanging on every word ands gesture. We are recognised
as the new F. Scot or Zelda Fitzgerald
So at the end of the year, this Land’s End of three hundred and sixty-five
days there is a danger that you will end up being overly retrospective and
thinking about the year that was – and these days of the many people
who didn’t make it to the end of the year. Those who didn’t survive
operative and post operative trauma, others who are left with their bodies
diminished and functioning in a more haphazard way.
We lost the author J G Ballard, the radio actor Norman Painting, who played
Phil Archer in the ‘The Archers’ for 60 years – the world record
for an actor playing a continuous role. I remember lying in my sleep-out overlooking
the Christchurch with the lights out and the radio on listening to the mysterious
world of gnarled accents and English shenanigans. I don’t think that
I remember when Phil started to build up a pig unit at Hollowtree or when
Reggie and Valerie Trentham sold Grey Gables Country Club to Jack Woolley,
but I do remember falling in love with the voice of someone playing a teenage
girl.
With luck and the right atmospheric conditions I could listen later on to
2SM with Mike Walsh playing records that would never get to New Zealand into
the small hours of the morning.
Don Lane is no longer with us, neither is Irving Penn the photographer nor
Edward Woodward the actor.
At the beginning of the year we lost the master of American writing, John
Updike, who gently dissected the lives of almost ordinary people and also
the writing of other authors with a meticulous clarity of thought and word.
We find in his characters the melancholy of familiar failing as well as the
disappointed joys of life.
We lost too many people around my age for me to feel remotely comfortable.

So what did I resolve ?
Well, I started my list resolving to get this bit of writing given to my brother
on time every month..