The new year is here, and I for one am very disappointed. Not least because it means that, for the next six months, we’ll be three rather than two years behind America in broadcasts of Days of Our Lives: John Black could remember his priest/mercenary/ art-thief/vole-wrangler past and run away to live in the bayou next week, but I’ll only know for sure in 2007.
But it’s more than that. It’s the constant failure of the future to live up the expectations of the past. 1984 was supposed to be a hell of mind-control and sinister surveillance; but Hell has many circles, and in ours Michael Jackson led the tap-dancing undead through the ‘hood and the A-Team squeezed off truck-loads of ammunition without hitting so much as a sleeping gopher.
Still, there was always 1987 up ahead, the year in which, according to the intro of Buck Rogers, Nasa would launch the last of its deep-space probes. But Rogers’s probe, a vessel of interplanetary innuendo lined with tin-foil and velcro, looked nothing like the things sent into space in 1987, economy-class garbage-disposal units where the orange juice came in ziplock bags and the windows couldn’t open.
Ah well, there was 2001 to look forward to. Kubrick had foretold a lunar base and visitations from enormous super-intelligent kitchen counters with no sinks. Surely we would be poking about in the seedier alleys of our solar system by then, we hoped. But by 2001 it was evident that we had lost our way, that Harry Potter wasn’t just an awful sub- literary cul-de-sac, and even the most gushing multiculturalists in their tie-died moo-moos had to agree that our species was going to the dogs. Britney Spears tried to cheer us up, displaying the charisma of a big singing block of black obsidian in her film debut, but it just wasn’t the same.
I think it was Dr Phil who said that those who have not learned the lessons of history are destined to build up resentment towards their life-partner over issues of unpaid child-maintenance from a previous commitment. While some would ponder at the wisdom of a fat man who publishes slimming guides, the spirit of his advice is well taken, and we should see the new year for what it is: another step towards our inevitable doom and the ultimate failure of the human experiment.
New Year resolutions seem to offer hope to the irresolute in the way that snorkels bring comfort to submariners. They offer the agnostic redemption and forgiveness of almost Catholic convenience. To the gluttonous they promise lentils and distilled water; to the emphysemic, a breath of fresh air. And to the sports fan they bring a brief moment of clarity in which he recognises the sins of the past year and vows never to repeat them: anniversaries bulldozed by monster truck races, parent-child weekends punctuated with furtive visits to a hidden transistor for rugby updates, candle-lit liaisons terminated by the first over of the day being bowled half a world away (”I can drive you home in two hours when they have lunch, or you can sleep on the couch. You’re beautiful and I’ve had the most wonderful eve … Christ! They’ve left out Kirsten!”).
One imagines that sports stars themselves know nothing of the moral ultimatums of New Year’s resolutions. Posh vows to purge 10kg — three quarters of her body-weight — and admires her form in the mirror, something between an obscene grasshopper and a dead desiccated whippet, Becks carefully prints out his with block crayons: ”Skor more goles, get hare kut like it woz in 2003 but like cooler yeah…”
Michael Schumacher’s list — written in merlot on silk — is indistinguishable from last year’s: ”1. Ram bloody Montoya if he gets uppity. Same applies to Barichello. Bloody goofy emotional South Americans. Both could do with a ride into the tyres. Bastards, trying to take my championship. 2. Spend $2-zillion — make it hard this year so not allowed to buy personal jet or fill khoi-pond with Chateau Rothschild ’23 again.”
Still, at least by January 5 we’ll be back to Kit Kats for breakfast and lunch with supper at Lard ‘n Stuff Drive-Thru. All good things must come to an end. Thank God.