Happy New Year to you. May 2024 be a better year for you than 2023 was.

During the last two festive seasons my son and I both had Covid in the days after Christmas, as you can read in this piece from 2022 and this one from 2021. We have escaped it this time round. For the first time since 31 December 2020 he, my daughter, my wife and I were all in the same room on New Year’s Eve. We watched “Sleepless in Seattle”, streamed through Amazon Prime, returning to our habit of seeing out the old year with a family-friendly movie. In the last few hours of 2018 we watched “Mamma Mia! Here we go again” on DVD, and as 2020 came to a close we watched “Rocky”. I can’t remember what we saw in 2019. Was it “Wayne’s World”? That was certainly a festive favourite around then.

I thought that I had seen “Sleepless in Seattle” but only the last hour or so seemed familiar, so maybe I missed the start whenever I saw it on TV. I definitely saw “You’ve Got Mail” at the cinema, but not this earlier pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I reminded the rest of my family, more than once, that Meg Ryan is an anagram of Germany.

The film was over just after 11.30pm so we switched to “Jools’ Annual Hootenanny”, the usual BBC2 offering either side of midnight. And, as usual, we switched to BBC1 for the countdown to midnight, the chimes from Big Ben and the firework display. And we considered all the milestones that we hope will be reached in the coming year: 50th, 60th and 80th birthdays to be celebrated by friends and family, and our children turning 18 and 20. At least one of them will be able to vote when the next General Election is called, but if it’s before mid-October, as seems likely, my daughter will still be too young.

As Larry Elliott pointed out in this piece yesterday, here in the UK “Labour governments have come to power five times in the past century and three of those occasions have come in years that end in a four: 1924, 1964 and 1974.” Not for the first time, I read a sentence like that and think, “1974 was fifty years ago. How did that happen?” The last time Labour came to power was in May 1997, nearly 27 years ago. That seems equally hard to process: 1997 was 27 years ago. I hope that my bewilderment at the passage of time continues for many years to come.