My first New Year.

While not my first New Year, what follows is the first one I have a solid memory of and therefore the first in a sense. While many have followed much more active and spirited, none has been quite as strange as this.

I was somewhere between 10 and 12. Being the last child, my parents were rightly enjoying a night off from us as my brother and sister were both going to friends’ places for the night. So I was put to bed as my parents headed off to a party, to return home in the wee hours. I simply did what any young lad would do. Waited for ten to fifteen minutes after they left, got up turned on the TV and sat down with a selection of sugar and ‘stayed up till New Year’.

After working my way through the commercial stations, is it just me of is Tv coverage of fireworks displays the most boring thing that can be filmed. “Oh look, another green streak of light on the tv, wow…”

I ended up on the ABC. Some b&w war film was playing, cool. I soon realised that is was a film about B52’s and nukes so it couldn’t be WW2. So why was it in colour? No, I wasn’t a film buff at that age but many a long Sunday afternoon had been spent watching enough WW2 films that I did have some clue there.

As it wound it’s way to end I worked out that everything hinged on the fate of one damaged B52 was what it was all about. The sight of a pilot ridding a nuke down to its target was the first thing I never forgot about the film.

The second was, as the streets around rose to the sounds of car horns and general screams of Happy New Year, the final scene unfolded with hundreds of nukes exploding around the world to the strains of every Englishman’s war time sweet heart “Vera Lyn” signing her big one “We’ll meet again”

I sat alone in the house on the first New Years I was alone and I watched the end of the world while everyone cheered in the back ground. I have always wondered if the timing of the ending had been deliberate on the part of some ABC program director.

I think I was 17 before it all made sense. I had fallen for Kubrick films and was working my way through them as I could track them down. Someone let me a copy of Dr Strangelove, I had herd of it but was unsure of the story. I just knew it was one of his war films.

It didn’t take long for me to work out it was that film.

I had never told anyone about that night. How could I have seen that film when I was fast asleep…

It may have been the first time I realized my own mortality, not sure. It was however, I think, the first time I trying to encompass the idea that, we humans could actually wipe everyone out. That was what I had trouble sleeping about for the next couple of weeks.