A new year?

If you measure your days by the Christian calendar it's now 2006.

I don't. But due to my religion not being recognized in official circles I'm stuck with it until the powers that be crumble under public pressure and allow me to re-date the days and months of the year.

My "New Year" was spent working behind the bar of the club.

But all was not as bad as it could have been. At 11:45pm the bar was closed for half an hour to allow the staff to see in the new year. So at 11:45 and 3 seconds I had a hold of a large Bacardi Limon and had skipped out the back door to head for a bench to wait for the celebratory fireworks to begin.

As I walked through the carpark I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cigarette packet and got a hold of the joint that I had prepared specially for the occasion, and lit it. Start as you mean to go on, and all that guff.

My MP3 player was turned to maximum, the joint was as strong as my drink and I stood in glorious solitude waiting for the bells. I thought of all the people I knew that had died in the last year, all the things I had done, all the things I had intended to do, and wondered what the next 12 months held in store for me.

In a moment of wonderfully cosmic timing, the first fireworks shot into the night sky around Edinburgh as my MP3 player played a sample from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hunter S Thompsons' words seeped into my brain like ether into a handkerchief...

"We'd gone in search of the American Dream. It had been a lame fuck around, a waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy, I felt like a monster re-incarnation of Horatio Alger, a man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."

I laughed out loud and began to dance a jig as the Dead Kennedy's version of Viva Las Vegas kicked in as the clouds were turned blood red by a firework large enough to make the gods pay attention.

"Here's to you Hunter!" I yelled and took a long drag on my joint. "Viva Las Vegas indeed."