Why I don't celebrate New Year's Eve

36 years ago today my mother died. It was only four months after my father's death and she had spent her first (only!) Christmas as a widow with us in North London. She went back to her home with my sister and a few days later I got the devastating phone call.

Seven years earlier one of her best frinds - the mother of my best friend in my girlhood - had died, so it was already a sad day in our calendar.

I can remember celebrating New Year's Eve on only a handful of occasions - all sad or disappointing in some way: the time my boyfriend went back to his secret fiancée, the one with gay friends when everyone wanted to kiss my husband, the Hogmanay on Princes Street in Edinburgh when we stood around in the cold waiting for something to happen, the Millennium Eve under Big Ben - actually that one was the best, with great fireworks.

Tonight we'll have a home-made Chinese meal with our youngest and her partner, drink some good wine by the log fire and maybe stay up till midnight, maybe not. But I'll think of my mother, who never met her grandchildren, and was such a loving woman and a great cook. To her I owe many Celtic qualities to do with hospitality and imagination.

Thank you, Ivegh Lassiter.