Nightmare on New Year's Eve

Every year, I wait for my birthday with a peculiar dread. Why did I have the misfortune to be born on New Year's Eve?
new years eve party
Don't have a birthday party on New Year's Eve . . . everyone leaves at 11.49pm to go to a better bash. Photograph: Alamy B.A.E. Inc. / Alamy/Alamy

It is my birthday on New Year's Eve. I do not need a chirpy calendar to announce the fact; I will know it is my birthday because there will be sick on the pavements. Or it will be like The Day of the Triffids, or Dr Who. People will stand around staring at the sky, waiting to be murdered by Cybermen or eaten by plants. I know this to be true: I have spent 35 years trying to make a New Year's Eve birthday work, and I cannot.

Who to blame? Christmas! Christmas has come and gone and taken everything. Your mother-in-law has observed you, as if you are a unique disease. Your father-in-law has pinched your bottom until you have no bottom and he no thumb. All the children have gone mad, and Camden Town resembles a Fat and Proud convention wearing the wrong facial expression. It's a Wonderful Life has segued into Driller Killer Grannies Hit The Sherry. You say I am exaggerating. Ha! I have tried everything, and everything has failed. Consider the evidence . . .

Plan A You have a party, and everyone leaves at 11.49pm to go somewhere better. To go somewhere else. In Wimbledon. Or Putney. Or even Southfields. But you cannot go somewhere else because the party was in your mother's house and you have to tidy the sofa because someone has sat on it. And if you do not tidy the sofa, your mother will stare at you like the cat does when it is angry. (Tanya's birthday: 1988)

Plan B You have a party, but you've invited too many women with eating disorders. Just before midnight, it turns into a bulimia party. People are freebasing Chocolate Buttons and injecting Anchor Original Real Cream between their toes ("Squirt Some Anchor Magic!" "I can't find a vein!"). There is a queue for the toilet, and not because people want to take cocaine. It's amazing quite how like Auld Lang Syne communal vomiting can sound.

(Tanya's birthday: 2003, 2006)

Plan C You go to a party where drinks are served, but you do not drink alcohol due to a brain chemistry so delicate that merely watching the box set of The Tudors can send you reaching for the Priory admission forms. (I have OD-ed on the Tudors. It is possible.) So you do not understand what people are saying to you at this party because they are drunk, and you are not. "Ywfvyc&@£wvduy!" they say. "GDtflhb3yuqfv%!" Then they may, or may not, fall off a balcony and die while laughing. You can then a) call an ambulance or b) call a taxi. (Tanya's birthday: 2001, 2002, 2005)

Plan D You go into London "to watch the fireworks". You realise that you are the only person in London who can count backwards from 10. (Tanya's birthday: 1999)

Plan E You stay in and watch television. This is your exit visa from the human race. You know it. The human race knows it. (Tanya's birthday: 2009 – draft proposal)

There are other opportunities for agony, but I do not have room to detail them (although do you know how boring it is watching people on alcopops jump into a swimming pool in Amersham?). And so, as the day approaches, I seethe and worry. I fixate on odd things, such as – is Hilary Mantel invited to a party? Is Noel Edmonds?

At least I can console myself that I'm not alone. I share a birthday with Simon Wiesenthal, Ben Kingsley and Anthony Hopkins, so, celestially speaking, I am in a sort of theatrical knight traffic jam, with a ghost carrying a copy of Auschwitz And The Allies at the back.

Even so, I wait for the day with a peculiar dread. Perhaps it was because I was born in a nunnery. Mother says I emerged, saw a nun, and screamed. I am screaming still. But I forget myself. Happy new year, dear readers, and a happy birthday to me.

Christmas with Kirstie I awoke on Christmas Eve to hear the television speak babble and witchery, as in Poltergeist. "Have a homemade Christmas!" it said. It was Kirstie Allsopp, released from Location, Location, Location and, in Kirstie's Homemade Christmas, chomping on everything that used to be normal about Christmas. Goodbye Argos. Goodbye turkey genetically engineered to be hatched with stuffing but without a head.

Kirstie was making homemade decorations, sweets, fancies and favours. She was tasting jam (and developing that bad Nigella Lawson habit of fellating her own finger™). She even made her own Christmas stockings, by sewing bits of should-be-landfill-and-in-a-sane-world-would-be together.

I would not mind, except for an irrational fear that Kirstie may appear on my doorstep and turn me into a festive sconce. And for a more rational fear – it is said that David Cameron is considering offering her a peerage if he wins the election. (This is like Sir Terence Conran rebranding the former Soviet Union.) So then Kirstie would emerge as a sort of Christmas Decoration Tsar, who will turn Gordon Brown into a biscuit. My final thought for 2009? Vote Labour.