have never been good at New Year’s resolutions.

New Year’s Eve, like Christmas Eve, is a time of contemplation for me. It’s a good moment to look back – not with a view to doing things better; that only works with practical stuff, like practising your swimming stroke or improving your French. No, the important stuff has to be done not better, but differently.

It might be the way you relate to your partner or your kids. It might be to bring more joy into your life. It might be to make time. It might be to let something go.

Doing things differently is difficult. We like habit. I guess that’s why people resolve to kick their habits at New Year. Some do that, through willpower; most of us fail. Actions and behaviour – habits – are on the surface. Why we act or behave in certain ways is usually buried deep – and so it’s hard to change our behaviour unless we change something more fundamental about ourselves.

My old Jewish friend Mona says you go through life carrying two bags, and you have to know which bag to put your problem in. One bag is time and money. The other bag is the life-and-death struggle.

The life-and-death struggle includes having any kind of conscious life at all beyond the effort to meet your material needs. And it includes coming to terms with death.

Mrs Winterson celebrated New Year with a mixture of gloom and anticipation. This was a woman for whom life was a pre-death experience. Somewhere there was a better world but it wasn’t on the bus route and she had never learned to drive.

Every year she wondered – out loud – if this would be her last. She wondered too if it would be the Year of the Apocalypse.

Our drill went like this: in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping and Dad was on the night shift, Mrs W stood at the bottom of the stairs blowing her version of the Last Trump. We didn’t have a bugle so it was usually a mouth organ or comb and paper. Sometimes she just banged a pan.

I had to run downstairs and get in the cupboard under the stairs, where there were two stools and an oil lamp. And lots of tinned food. Then we read the Bible and sang. When the End came we were going to wait under the stairs till an angel liberated us. I used to wonder how the angel’s wings were going to fit under the stairs, but Mrs Winterson said there would be no need for the angel to come in.

I don’t know where Dad was supposed to be in all of this, but he still had his tin helmet from the war, so perhaps he was supposed to wear that and wait outside.

We were living in End Time. If you live that way you live on high alert. I did. I do. There’s so much we carry with us from our past. And if we can’t change it then the next best thing is to recognise it.

At least that way you can laugh about it or maybe make something of it for yourself.

We had a ritual at home of burning the calendar on the fire on the stroke of midnight. I still do that. I like going round the house collecting the old calendars. I realise that few people have open fires these days, and a shredder doesn’t have the same poetic intensity.

A friend of mine writes a page of regrets and sets fire to it in the kitchen with a candle. Other friends let off fireworks, each one a wish for what might happen.

Fire is celebratory and defiant. Light and fire have always been symbols of the spirit against the relentlessness of time.

Nearing midnight I turn on the radio. Hearing Big Ben chime the hour on the BBC has a solemnity to it and a sense of tradition.

On the first stroke of the great bell I open the back door to let the Old Year out, and I stand with her as she goes. Goodbye! On the last stroke I open the front door to let in the New Year, welcoming her as she comes.

This is all pretty busy because I have to make it past the fireplace with the calendars on the way.

And usually, because everybody gets a bit sentimental sometimes, I’m reciting Tennyson to myself:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

The rest of this part of the very long poem ‘In Memoriam’ is pretty terrible tea-towel stuff so I stick with the first verse. Being a great poet doesn’t mean that you always write great poetry.

In itself, that’s a lesson for New Year.

We’re humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don’t know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We’ve been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We’re pessimists who believe it’s too late so what the hell? We’re the comeback kids in love with second ­chances. And every New Year is another chance.

What is New Year anyway?

Until 1752 Britain and her colonies (sorry about this, ­America) had two new years a year because the legal new year began on March 25th, Lady Day, so-called because if you’re going to have Jesus born on ­December 25th Mary has to be bang on time and conceive on March 25th – a date conveniently close to the spring equinox of March 21st, when our pre-Christian ancestors celebrated New Year. New life, the return of the sun, all very sensible.

Britain has been celebrating a new-year festival on January 1st since the 13th century, but until the 18th century the legal new year on March 25th forced the custom of double-dating for nearly three months of every year depending on whether you reckoned you were in a new year or not.

To add to the fun, in 1582 Roman Catholic Europe ditched the Julian calendar, invented by Julius Caesar in 45BC, and started to measure the year by the Gregorian calendar, still used today.

The problem was that Caesar’s solar year was eleven minutes a year out, which added a day to the calendar every hundred and twenty-eight years. By the time we had reached the 1500s, the calendar pinned on the wall (OK, so there wasn’t one but you get the point) bore no relation to the two equinoxes and the solstices. Pope Gregory decided Europe needed a new calendar, named after him, of course, and because he was Pope everybody had to agree. Except England.

England was busy splitting forever with the Church of Rome – this was our first Brexit from Europe. Naturally we weren’t buying their calendar with a different picture of the pope for every month.

So we carried on being eleven days different from the rest of Europe. And we did this, not just Britain but America too, once the Puritans had made it to Plymouth Rock, right up until 1752.

You can hear the old calendar in the names of the months: September – the seventh month; October – the eight month; ­November – the ninth month; December – the tenth month.

Adjusting to the new calendar in 1752 involved ‘losing’ eleven days. And so September 2nd 1752 was followed by September 14th 1752.

Time is a mystery.

Here is my New Year’s Day steak sandwich.

YOU NEED

Best sourdough bread you can buy

Sirloin steak. Buy a wedge and slice it thinner than usual – think sandwich not slab.

Winter salad greens and reds – radicchio, chicory, romaine lettuce

Horseradish

Home-made mayo (see ‘Susie’s Christmas Eve Gravlax’)

METHOD

Slice the bread not too thin. Spread with mayo. Not butter.

Pile on the greens and reds – both pieces of bread.

Fry or grill your slices of sirloin the way you like them – bloody or burnt – and put one or two on top of one slice of bread.

Spread the steak slice with horseradish.

Slap the second slice of bread on top of the first – the lettuce will stay put.

Cut in half with a lethal knife.

Eat at once.

Drink with a slightly chilled Gamay whatever the time of day, including breakfast. This is New Year’s Day and millions of people will be detoxing, dieting and proclaiming Dry January. Take a stand.

If I have guests who are vegetarian I make them an omelette sandwich, same bread, spread with HP sauce, no butter, and served with a glass of champagne. Or a cup of strong tea. That’s the best I can do.

Happy New Year.