A new year would be a new year if you could sit on top of a mountain and watch things turn around you, clouds and chirping birds and fog flying all around your head in a way that you know things have changed. Something tangible, something different from how every new year is, a day spent looking into the mirror wondering if I look like a wiser person living in an era, a decade, a time that will later be put down as characteristically deranged or dynamic or whatever. But the mountaintop is not a recurring dream, what used to be a recurring dream is the throwing of bottles off a terrace and then riding bicycles over the shards on the road, like a movie scene. Hurl bottle over, crash and tinkling glass, then a bicycle bell and pedalling feet. No one gets hurt, no one's tyre gives. There are ladies with brilliant white smiles and gents with gallant moustaches, and they ride over glass into a rising sun, talking about chai. Very sixties. And no, this is not a metaphor.

This year the ideal new year has changed. There are loopholes in the plan but I want to be in the most non-festive place imaginable, a quiet pastel hotel room with a boring channel on, and I want to be without a phone and I want to be hungry, just so I can get out early in the morning feeling like I need to put something in me, food and drink and air and light, instead of getting up at one feeling like my throat has shrivelled up and my guts must turn themselves inside out soon. I'd like to go looking for a new year instead of having it creep up on me. That is all.