What time is it?

This time last week it was New Years Eve, which is the most over-rated day of the entire year.  In my pub dwelling days Christmas eve was always happy and fun, in those days most of the country still shut down for a week so we were celebrating the beginning of a weeklong liquid drug binge.  New year’s eve signalled the end of fun and back to work once the hangover had cleared, the mood was different and it nearly always turned nasty.

It’s probably thirty years since I last went “out” on New year’s eve, a mellow mood and Jool’s Hootenanny is just the job most years, although this year’s show was savaged by that cunt SIR Rod fucking Stewart.  I’m not a fan.  We used to go outside at midnight to listen to the church bells but nowadays all you can hear is fireworks, to say it sounds like a war zone is probably in poor taste in this current state of mad worldness.

Why do people celebrate the turning of the year or rather what exactly is it we celebrate?  Survival?  Another twelve month period negotiated (or maybe in my case just getting Xmas over and done), if so then surely our birthday is more appropriate.  Come to think of it do we celebrate survival twice?  Side tracked…  We go mad on New Years eve because we are conditioned to do so, most people obey without question because they just do what everyone else does.  In following the herd to the pub we spend a fortune on booze, generate a bit of tax revenue and line the pockets of the brewers and distillers.  I wonder who does own the breweries?

According to Google, it was the early Christians who began measuring the years since the birth of Brian in an attempt to distance themselves from the Roman calendar, which makes sense.  However it seems the earliest recorded mention of an AD date is by a monk called Dionysius Exiguus around 525 and it didn’t become widespread in Britain until the eight and ninth centuries.  Presumably in those days most people got by quite nicely without any concept of time?

But not now!  in order to function in any way in our enlightened world the measurement of time has to take place and our accepted method works.  Some clever bugger sat down and calculated moons and months then broke it all down into hours and minutes.  Chuck in a few leap years here and there, jobs a good un.  We gave them all names for convenience and through the course of what we call a year it all works remarkably well.  But on New Year’s Eve we commemorate a measurement of time that has an arbitrary starting point (the birth of a largely forgotten prophet) just over two thousand years ago.  Or to put it another way, someone plucked a point in passed time and said “that’ll do”.

I kind of get why people would celebrate more natural phenomena like Solstice or Equinox, there is something tangible going on and it’s no coincidence that these events fit almost perfectly within our twelve month calendar.  So why did we change?  Bloody Christians.