January 1st marks a new year in Australia. That’s hardly a unique state of affairs. As Australians awake to the unblemished first day of 2025, lids dragging across dry eyeballs in the screaming heat of summer, nasal passages desiccated from air the conditioning that is required to reach a temperature at which you could physically manage sleep the night before, people in Ireland will still be asleep, and it will, if briefly, still be 2024.
It will be evening here in Canberra before family and friends at back in Ireland awake to the first few hours of 2025, the one foot that has escaped from beneath a high tog duvet numb from the cold, nasal passages full of the seasonal ague that runs through everyone in the house each winter.
The recent election left people here in Canberra somewhat disgruntled. That too is a state of affairs to which anyone in Ireland can relate. One of the more charming attempts to pacify the masses on behalf of the local government here is a return of the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display at midnight. After all, if people’s heads are craned upward, they have less time to notice reality on the ground. The city is filled with tall apartment buildings, one of which I am lucky enough to live in, so New Year’s Eve will have been spent in a time-honoured tradition – watching Die Hard, followed by catching the fireworks display from the livingroom window.
The latter tradition is new to me, and I’m excited about it. The former was developed on the first New Year’s Eve after my mother died nine years ago. Until then, I would close out each December with her in the house in Limerick where I grew up, curled on to the battered old sofa we’d had since before I was born, talking about what the next 12 months might hold for us and looking forward to tomorrow, when we would sit down to her obscenely good New Year’s Day dinner.
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The first December 31st without her fell just a month after her death and it felt like an unbearable proof of her absence. Like a temporal barrier that her living memory would remain forever trapped behind, carrying her further away into the past as I trudged forward, 20-something and baffled without her. She had only been gone for a few weeks, but the moment January crested the hill, it would be true to say that she died “last year”.
When my then-boyfriend asked what I felt like doing on the last day of that terrible year, I supposed there was only one thing to do. Watch the silliest and least upsetting film I could think of and eat mince pies on the pleather couch of our rented Dublin flat as a way of waiting it out. It became a tradition on a night that is often ultimately about waiting it out for many people. This loaded, liminal night that feels like a death, a funeral and the cusp of something all at once. So we watch the stupid Die Hard films year by year in numerical order (they get progressively worse and therefore more enjoyable), first in Ireland, then the UK, and now in Australia. When we run out, we start again at the beginning. The mince pies don’t vary. They have a sort of blanketing sedative effect on gloomy spirits.
When you leave home to live in another country, you take with you whichever traditions can feasibly be translated to the new place. Once you have lived a while in the new country, you realise that there are potential selves you might become in other environments. That the person you recognised as yourself in one place can be quite different in another, engaging in different habits, hobbies, and ideas. You naturally respond to the culture, the environment and the incentive structure of the place in which you now live. Maybe it changes you or perhaps it just reveals your potential to live in a different way.
In Ireland and in London, I never seemed to wake up without my alarm in the morning. Darker, chillier mornings do not beckon a cosy body into wakefulness. Here in Australia, the sun is doing its utmost to melt the window frames before 6am in summer and still beats merrily in by 7am on Canberra’s below-zero winter mornings. In London, I was a significantly more efficient person. The place simply demanded it of me. Everything requires organisation, planning, scheduling, booking ahead and unreasonable levels of waiting. In Australia and in Ireland, I walk at a slower pace and have less panic bashing against my rib cage as I move through the day’s basic tasks. I’m not the impatient person I am in London, nor anywhere near as cool as I pretended to be in London. Australia’s wider streets and bigger scale in general mean that people have more of a concept of personal space than they do in the narrower, older streets and smaller public spaces of home. In Ireland, I am put off exercise by the weather and a more self-conscious culture. In Australia, I do it without much resistance sense of conspicuousness.
A new year is a new beginning. I don’t really know what a new year in Australia might hold. It has all the vast unfamiliarity to me that the country itself still does.
That’s a bit frightening. It’s exciting, too.
It might be cheating to express the hope that 2025 will hold a visit home for me. It’s wonderful to experience new selves in new places, but I prefer not to go too long without reconnecting with the original. The person who sat down to New Year’s Day dinner in my mother’s house, and didn’t yet realise how much we can change when we need to.
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