Should old acquaintances be forgot at midnight...

IDO this thing on New Year’s Eve — I’ve told you about it before, where I get together with my family and we write our New Year’s resolutions down in a book, by way of making a solid commitment to actually doing them. And they can’t be stuff we’re giving up, they have to be new good stuff we want to do or try. Like a relative of mine who annually wants to learn a new language only, alas several years in a row, the language school chosen mysteriously shut down. Apparently. Hmm. And then the following New Year’s Eve, we read the book and look back on our year, and slag each other for our failures more or less.

Traditional family carry-on basically. And let’s face it you’ve got to do something to get through New Years Eve — the night that most people will tell you they secretly hate. But this year despite me for the first time in a decade achieving the goal I set for myself, there will be something very bittersweet when I look back over 2017. It’s been a year of major highs and lows.

The real high was getting Lunchtime Live, my radio show on Newstalk. It was for me actually, like winning the Lotto. I’d worked towards it and wanted it for a very long time. But media isn’t like other jobs where you get a gig based on seniority or qualifications.

It’s much more mercurial than that. You need luck. You need to be in the right place at the right time. You need to be, for some reason, for a fleeting moment — what they want. And to be honest there were never any guarantees. So even though I had worked my ass off for years — there was every chance it wouldn’t happen. Indeed I’d been told many times over many years by many people that it wouldn’t happen. And only for my own bloody mindedness and sheer inability to let go of the dream because I wanted it so much I’d probably have sensibly given up on it years ago. So this year after many, many years of failing to achieve my New Year’s Eve goal, I will finally get some kind of ribald, semi-insulting (as is only proper) praise from my family for that.

A year where the high was that good, you would think would be a good one, but the low was also a pretty spectacular one. This year there will be an empty chair at dinner table. My Mum Julie died in May so this is the first year we’ve had Christmas without her. And 2018 will be the first year I have ever faced without her in my life. And, oh I know, they’re ‘always with you’. But to be honest, it’s not the same really is it?

I don’t personally believe you ever get over the death of someone you love. I think you just learn to accommodate it. You still miss them. You still always wish they were there — especially for specific occasions that you’d like them to see or to share with. But also you simply just wish they were around so you could tell them stuff.

So you could ask their opinion on some small aspect of your life that they would actually care about — when most people wouldn’t be remotely interested. You miss that umbrella of love that you once happily had the cover of — instead of the rain of life, falling directly on your head.

You even just miss the routine of them. I drove past my mum’s old nursing home on a Sunday afternoon recently and saw a car with a middle-aged woman in it, pulling out of the gate and I unexpectedly burst into tears. She got to visit her mum on a Sunday afternoon. I will never do that again. I know that’s silly. Yes I know it’s the circle of life. I can rationalise all the reasons it was a happy release with great maturity and insight. But at the end you still have no mum. And that loss is still a huge gap- ing hole. So, 2017, I have mixed feelings about you. You were very good to me but you were also the worst too. A year is an arbitrary yardstick in our lives but in the true sense of life’s rich tapestry you had it all. You also taught me — if I didn’t already know it — that there will be good times again after bad times and, sadly, of course, vice versa.

And that everything, the good and the bad, will pass. Roll on the next one. Happy new year 2018. @ciarakellydoc Ciara’s radio show Lunchtime Live is on Newstalk FM weekdays, 12- 2