Anno Domini

When the clock struck midnight on the last day of the last year of the first decade of the third millennium of the year of our Lord, I was out cavorting with four friends whom I’ve known for more than five years and one more whom I had just met.

When the two hands of the clock met to give the illusion of a single finger sticking straight out the middle, we were rolling into old watering holes we had not been in half a decade. Some of them had remained exactly the same while others had drastically changed for the worst. It wasn’t, in the eyes of many, what you would call a “cool” night, but it was, nonetheless, a whole lotta fun.

Ten hours later, I was standing on a platform where I had last been over five years earlier and where I’d said goodbye to it all, waiting to greet a friend I hadn’t met in three months to arrive from a town I’d never been to. We drove around Chowringhee and stopped at New Market and paid a visit to the Cathedral where I saw what I had seen every weekend for ten years of my life through new eyes and new wonder.

Nine hours later, I was standing in a room where I’d had my first sip of Heineken all those years ago with people who were screaming and singing into the air and firecrackers exploding into the eight storey sky outside as we tried to Save the Night, but – as always – would fail.

When Londoners and people along the Greenwich Meridian were doing the exact same thing, I was sending off notes to ghosts and, assailed by pangs of hunger, craving for cupcakes and a two week or two year (either would have suited me perfectly) rewind on life.

We celebrate the New Year's not to greet the one that comes, but to bid farewell to the one that has gone by. Whether it is with tears or with smiles, it does not matter, as long as it is one of either and not neither.