What I learned from Doris Day

Doris Day has died at the age of 97. When I heard this news I wasn’t transported to a scene in one of her movies with Rock Hudson. Instead, I remembered sitting in the dark English countryside during the very first few hours of this millennium, carefully removing a lit cigar from my sleeping brother’s hand as he snored on a chaise longue. Everything changes, but New Year’s Eves never do. They carry the same sense of dreary ennui, the dead-sky-at-tea-time feeling that hangs around the winter months. But I first met Doris Day on New Year’s Day at the beginning of this century, the day when we thought we’d wake up to find that every aeroplane in the world had fallen out of the sky. 

At five in the morning in a country house twenty miles from London I found that I was the only person awake. Someone had left the television on, buzzing in the corner of the room, hours after the fireworks we had watched from Paris, from Madrid and, finally, from London had fizzled out.