Quite simply, the bain of my life. As Nick Hancock put it on some panel show or other, it's "enforced fun".
Obviously, staying in and watching the telly is a complete no-no unless you're married, in a stable relationship or old. No, being a single, young male I'm duty bound to join in the particularly odious willy waving contest that is planning a NYE celebration. Whether it's an intimate get together with close friends, a simple, no nonsense house party or night on the lash or you're going for the full on uber-cool deluxe clubbing experience, the important thing is not to actually enjoy yourself but to give the impression that you're having the best time imaginable and make sure that everyone else around you before, during and after the event knows just how much cooler you and your mates are than everyone else and just how much of a better time you're having than them.
Ironically, giving the impression of enjoyment is the easy part. Getting dressed up, loading yourself up with booze and drugs, spending a sh*tload of cash you haven't got and generally trundling around shouting loudly tends to suffice, wherever you are on NYE. It's the nagging realization at the pit of your stomach that all of it is utterly futile that's the hard part.
Whatever you do, you can't win. If you go for the low-key, "NYE's just another night approach" your mates who've gone to Fabric will inevitably end up going back to the Colombian women's Beach Volleyball team's hotel while you wake up with a horrible hangover, a black eye from where you had a fight with your best mate after getting off with his bird or sister (or something equally tedious) and only the prospect of watching your team draw 0-0 in arctic conditions in the good old New Year's Day match.
If you do decide to hit the Big Smoke however, you'll find yourself paying £50 for the privelige of being surrounded by pretentious tw*ts who don't really know anything about the music and are only here to look cool at the "less defined cultural happenings" the venue is planning to appeal to its target Hoxtonite audience. You'll also be plagued by the sneaking suspicion that you and your mates are actually no better yourselves. You'll probably wind up doing far too many drugs to compensate and drinking too much because "come on, it's New Year's Eve" and wind up on the couch at your mate's flat at 8am chatting, purely for the sake of it, with his boring mate from uni about the concept of consensus reality and its portrayal in The Matrix (or something equally pretentious) all the while hating yourself but not wanting to seem rude. And meanwhile, back home? That rave that your idiot mate was planning, turns out, for once, to be awesome, 1,000 people turn out and it has to be broken up by riot police at 10 in the morning and, of course, the owner of the site's p*ssed off now and the police are wise to it so it'll never happen again. It'll be one of those you unmissable nights but, still you had a good time in London, right?
And yes, I know I shouldn't take it so seriously but this is me we're talking about, and I'm a neurotic fool and there's just too much pressure on the whole thing.