Welcome to 2010

There something strange about the whole concept of the New Year. If you look at it logically, you just wake up and it’s another day. There’s no real difference beyond the one we impose by saying that a number has changed – that today it is 2010 and not 2009. We make it important.

I was at my house in Scotland for New Year. For many Scots, the New Year is more important than Christmas as a cause for celebration and there are some very strange rituals (strange, at least, if you are not Scottish) connected with it. If you are doing things properly, then shortly after “the Bells” (meaning the bells that ring out at midnight for the New Year) then someone is supposed to knock on your front door bringing something to drink (usually whisky) and some fuel (usually coal). This is called “first footing” and happens all over Scotland – it certainly happened at my house, even if the person doing the first footing was one of my friends who had been in the house the whole evening but had slipped out of the back door and entered again by the front door just to fulfil the requirements of the ritual.

I have spent New Year in some strange places over the years. There were several spent in Morocco. That was odd because, Morocco being an Islamic country, Christmas was something more or less reserved for foreigners. And the New Year, although recognised, was an official holiday not a traditional or religious one – those qualities were reserved for the Islamic New Year. New Year in China, especially in Beijing, was interesting, too. Once again, Christmas was not something native or natural to China. When I was there, the hotels and the stores that catered for foreigners had started to notice it because it was profitable to do so. But recognition of western New Year was a matter of politeness. Chinese New Year, however, that was something very different, a celebration hundreds of millions of Chinese lit up the sky with fireworks.

In the end, I think the important thing is that we carry our New Year with us. After all, every culture I know of celebrates the New Year – even if they cannot agree on the date. Whether we are at home or abroad, with our families or in a totally different culture, we feel the need to mark the change as some kind of rite of passage. So whether you toasted your New Year with whisky or wine, whether you were in Kirkcudbright or Milan (or Beijing for that matter), I hope you had a good one!

Dr. Laurence Bristow-Smith
H M British Consul General
& Director General for Trade