Downers and uppers

New Year’s Eve parties cannot be described in lyrical terms, recalling perhaps the elegance of poetry by, say, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde’s decadence being more like it. I am not among those who hate New Year’s parties; in fact, on the contrary. Let’s start with the bad news. The worst New Year’s ever was 31 December 1984, in Pentonville. Now that was a real downer. Talk about a party that never took off. On that particular night it never even got started. Everyone was locked up by 7 p.m., and most of the jailbirds were asleep by the time the clock struck 12. I stayed up by force of habit, but all it did was make me more miserable. Looking back at my description of that night in the immortal jail memoir Nothing to Declare, I see that particular New Year’s Eve was the first time I felt the worst was over.