Happy New Year!

I do like New Year's Eve, and not just because of the splendid excuse it presents for a party. Time is always slipping away around us, continuously grinding the granite of our lives into a fine sand that is instantly lost on the wind. Rightly, we don't pay this much attention - we'd go mad if we did - but we all do notice at some point, astonished by how the decades have carved us into bizarre and unexpected shapes. New Year's Eve allows us to acknowledge the process, but it doesn't require us to get maudlin about it, offering instead the worthy and time-honoured alternative of revelling in the moment itself, blissfully distracted from our mortality by family, friends and booze.

This only works if we're all distracted at once which is why we mark the time together. Except that we don't. It's already 2012 in Australia as I type this, just before noon in the USA. My compatriots will be singing Auld Lang Syne six hours before the time-shifted Times Square celebrations get replayed on Texas televisions. This rolling wave of time, the blurring of midnight across the world also helps though, easing us through the transition. For some Time isn't so much relative as entirely arbitrary: Samoa has flipped itself into the future, for example, and we will continue with our newest tradition - popping corks twice, once with Big Ben for GMT and then again at midnight, local time. As I say, if nothing else, it's a splendid excuse for a party.

Thanks for reading the blog over the past year - your attention and comments have all been much appreciated. I hope you have/are having a wonderful evening and I wish you all a very Happy New Year, whenever it begins for you.