THERE really is no such thing as 1995. The concept of changing a number on an office date stamp at the bong of a clock this morning is confined to the limited imaginations of a limited number of people and rural Scots who go off radar with a bottle for four days.
Countless viruses, bacilli and spermatozoa careered through Creation at midnight without aid of a party hat or a whoopee whistle. The average cat and dog, water buffalo or Thompson's gazelle snoozed through the night without any notion that some signal point had been passed.
In the human domain, if Pope Gregory had not tinkered with the calendar we would already be somewhere in February. The Thais are already somewhere into the 22nd century. Muslims, you will not be surprised to learn, will have no truck with our infidel way of counting and the Japanese, who kick off their official history with the Goddess of The Sun are, quite literally, light years away.
Having established that 1995 is meaningless to half the globe and most of chemistry, we have to bear in mind the big midnight bong of a few hours ago changes nothing in the habits of men where it may matter. As the sun rises this morning over Bosnia-Herzegovina, somebody is taking aim. It is doubtful if most Angolans or Rwandans are particularly aware of which century they are in since they seem to have gone back a couple.
On the depressing and frayed fringes of the Russian empire, good Christian men will have put their fingers in their ears and piled ordinance into each other, deaf to and three time zones away from the chimes of Big Ben. Even in Washington, the capital of Western values and Oh Christmas Tree schmaltz, it is unlikely the President will jog out of the White House this morning over to the Secretary of State's place, give the stringy old goat a shake and say 'Warren, from this morning, we are going to do everything differently. Isn't that great?' Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that 1995 does not exist, we are supposed to make outrageously insupportable New Year resolutions in its honour. Admittedly this is a traditional preoccupation of the early middle-aged who, sniffing mortality, attempt to fend it off with a calendar commitment to a cleaner life. The young leave tyre marks on the road of December and just burn into the New Year.
The oldies deceive themselves, of course. 'I am a drunk this month and sure as hell, I will be one next month,' said a realistic lady friend of mine, kept erect by three layers of face powder and her corset. Try as I might I could not, this year, raise any evidence of interest among contemporaries in the New Year resolution. Even a group of the hardest drinkers I know (drink is a favourite target of resolutions), people you sneak past in a bar wearing nuclear and biological protection suits, give up drinking once a year but not in January.
'Yep,' one said, 'when the kidneys start thumping their way through the bottom of your back, you have to lay off for a while to give the internal organs a fighting chance, but we do that in February because that is the shortest month.' A colleague, spittling fragments of a good Christmas lunch and half a bottle of port over my shirt front, came up with a laudable resolution applicable at any given moment but which he seemed to want to reserve for today. 'I will believe what I believe instead of what some sod believes who is supposed to know more than I am supposed to.' Excepting his syntax and circumstances such as open heart surgery or landing a 747, I thought that was an admirable approach to any situation and it fired me into the folly of resolutions.