NEW YEAR’S EVE (1998/1999) 

I’m staring at the old Nokia I inherited from my mum, the kind that was so strong it could survive being thrown at a wall and, possibly, the onset of all-out nuclear war. It has no signal and barely any battery. The rest of our group have sensibly disappeared home. Me and John, my best friend, are stood in Norwich city centre in the middle of a storm like the inside of the world’s most uninspiring snow globe. The buses have stopped and we’ve lost our chance of a lift. We start walking. 

After a seemingly endless arctic trek, avoiding wild Gary Boys and other native Norfolk predators, we reach Katie’s house. Katie is in the same theatre group as us, a delightfully acerbic Jewish girl, whose qualities stand out in the homogenous landscape of England’s Deep South. Looking at the pair of soaked, shivering disasters stood on her doorstep, she welcomes us in with a cup of tea and a pair of blankets. We bed down on her dining room floor, badly-dressed dormice sheltering under a dinner table. 

No more than five minutes pass before the door bursts open. A man stands silhouetted in the light spilling down from the landing, he is swaying. It’s Katie’s dad. An alcoholic Scottish man with a temper. This is obviously the ideal person to join the teeth-chattering and stress headache party we’ve already got going. John and I pretend to be asleep. This tactic means nothing to Drunky McDradlechops. 

Standing over us, his whiskey breath managing to penetrate through the wool, he loudly asks: “Are you boys kissing?” Then he laughs, a gurgling phlegmy kind of laugh that sounds like the squealing of a pig stuck by an inexperienced slaughter-man. We stay quiet, both hoping that he’ll get bored with his clumsy interrogation. He stumbles out of the room again. I hear John sigh with relief. “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter, still at a stage where swearing feels like something grown-ups do. 

A few more minutes pass and the door bursts open again. He is sticking to his guns. That Glaswegian roar again: “Are you…boys…kissing?!” Again, we stay silent. The only sounds are the clinking of the ice in his whiskey glass, the chattering of our teeth and the ticking of the clock on the mantel. No response forthcoming, he leaves again, slamming the door behind him. Again, sighs of relief emerge from your hypothermic heroes.

Inevitably he returns. The door has been flung open and slammed so many times at this point that I feel as if  I’m in some incredibly underwritten Ray Cooney farce, that someone must be hiding in a wardrobe nearby wearing nothing but y-fronts, socks and sock garters. Like Peter pretending Jesus was just some bloke he once met in an inn, we deny Isaiah Boozlestein for a third time. 

He is more persistent, perching himself on the edge of the table so that his legs dangle down. I shift under the blanket and see the pale veiny calf between his dirty trouser leg and threadbare socks. “Are you boys kissing?!”, he almost sings. Finally I reply: “No. Just trying to sleep.” 

He stands up abruptly muttering something about English people not being able to take a joke. It’s universally acknowledged that the best audience this side of Saturday night at the Glasgow Empire is two teenage boys with wet socks who have comprehensively failed to get off with any girls on New Year’s Eve. 

The next day, trudging to the bus stop, I resolve that the Millennium Eve will be different. 

NEW YEAR’S EVE (1999/2000) 

It is different. Five to midnight and we are on the cusp of a new Millennium (as long as you fudge the maths a bit). John and I are…sat in my room. The rest of the Western world is out drinking itself into a stupor to welcome in a new age, Tony Blair is holding hands with the Queen and at house parties across Norfolk, the contents of parents’ drinks cabinets are lubricating the love lives of the county’s miscreant teens. 

John and I have spent the evening recording songs I am certain will turn us into international pop megastars. Now as midnight looms up in all its glittery insignificance, I insist that we listen to Changes by David Bowie as the tiny TV shows images of fireworks bursting over the Thames. London is still a place of infinite fascination and mystery to me rather than a brilliant place tarnished by memories of godawful bedsits. 

“Every time I thought I’d got it made, it seemed the taste was not so sweet.” I nod along to Bowie convinced I know exactly what he is talking about, the arrogant teenage conviction that obviously my life is just as complicated. Twelve years on and I’m a little closer to getting when the Dame was on about. I’ve had a few real failures now, a few actual disappointments beyond a girl not liking me or an exam not quite going my way. The confidence of that kid whirling around to Bowie seems more than a little alien to me now. He believed he could be so many things. I realise I probably won’t be. 

NEW YEAR’S EVE (2011/2012) 

There is something that ties together those two previous New Year’s eves though. It’s that me and John spent them together. I’m thinking about John a lot at the moment because 2012 will be a big year for him. He’s working with cameras at the Olympics but, more importantly, he’s getting married. And I’m his best man. 

It’s a watershed occasion. One that matters much more than the ticking over of the calendar, even that huge flip from one millennium to the next. I met John when I was 11. We have been friends for almost 17 years, more than half our lives, through relationships, moves, university, jobs and at least one death. When I met John, I really didn’t have any other friends. I was a misunderstood kid at school, quick to tears and overly bookish. At least some of the bullying I received, I brought on myself. 

In the first conversation I ever had with John, I called him a “cunt” for embarrassing me during an improvisation exercise at the drama group we’d both started attending. It was not the ideal start. But we began to bump into each other mooching around in record shops before classes. Soon we were deliberately arranging to meet. I was arguably more confident but sometimes John was like my interpreter for the rest of the world, explaining my eccentricities to other people when they didn’t understand. 

We formed bands, shedding drummers at a Spinal Tap-esque rate, and developed our own knotted and gnarled collection of in-jokes and understandings. It’s how a friendship should be and even when months pass without us meeting or speaking on the phone, when we come back to it, we slip easily into the groove. Outside of my family and my girlfriend, I understand and am understood by John the most. 

In 2012, things are really going to change for him. I’m happy and proud that I get to be a small part of that. I’m an only child but I feel that in John, I have a brother. We’re coming to a point when our lives are going to start on a different course again, we’re even in different countries now, but I still feel as close to the man as I did to the teenage punk shivering next to me under a drunken Scottish man’s dining table.