Well into the 1950s, 25 December was a normal working day in Scotland; the important festival was Hogmanay, 31 December. The Scots tradition was to reflect quietly on the dying year, to nurture an inner space which after midnight would fill with warm companionship. The music, laughter and drink arrived with the bells; they represented release both from the previous year, and from the routine inhibitions of Calvinism and social convention that weighed heavily at all other other times. Social barriers were momentarily crossed in a spirit of egalitarian communality.
Today, Hogmanay in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, is something very different: just another marketing opportunity, a steamroller of invasive programming, leaving no space for either genuine interiority or a shared moment of transcendence. Six years ago, the ritual new year gathering at the Tron kirk on the Royal Mile was expanded into a range of events – concerts, funfairs, a torchlight procession – stretching over a week. The centrepiece was a late-night Hogmanay party against the city’s incomparable skyline, with a firework display and live bands on several stages. The logic was commercial, to benefit the tourist sector at a low season, but in a larger scale the aim was to position Edinburgh as leader in an imaginary race to herald the millennium. It was promoted as “the biggest and greatest new year’s celebration in the world “, an inspiration for nationalist pride.
Since 1996, however, when the crush of 350,000 people attracted by the promotional hysteria led to hundreds of serious injuries and 90 tons of broken glass, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay has been tightly controlled. The city centre is sealed off by tight security and numbers limited to 180,000. A wristband pass is compulsory for those wishing to enter the restricted zone, precluding residential visiting – the famous “first footing” – across a wide area. The passes, available through pubs and restaurants, carry sponsors’ logos.
Even the nature of the crowd is created by the marketing. The sponsors need the young and affluent above all. The idea of a mix of generations – one of the most attractive aspects of the Hogmanay myth – is absurdly passe. The desired audience is socially exclusive: students and young professionals. The city they are visiting is not a host, but a brand name whose selling points nowhere include its own people. The universal sign of bonding is a brewer’s logo.
What brings the shining-eyed thousands from London and overseas is also a dream of Scottishness. Yet Edinburgh, though the political capital, is in demography and social character the least “Scottish” of the nation’s cities. As Britain fragments and Europe integrates, Scotland has found a new lease of cultural life as a vibrant, gregarious country where some of the quasi-Celtic “communal” virtues – embodied in music, history, even politics – persist. A lively synthesis of real presences and symbolic invocation fuels the sense of difference, even “specialness”. And Hogmanay remains one of the sites where this self-image can be conveniently located.
But there is no “true” Scottishness waiting to be uncovered beneath the tartan wrapping; the country has, at least since 1746, lived mythically and historically at the same time. If the packaging and selling of Scotland is more intense than ever, this makes the country less rather than more different in the modern world. Distinctiveness remains, but it cannot be found at the end of a whisky glass. Nevertheless, people will flock to Edinburgh in search of “Hogmanay” and the city will put on a show to convince them of its authenticity.
The folklorist F Marian Macneill saw Hogmanay as a renewal “of hopes unfulfilled and friendships dulled”, and even “of faith in humanity that not all its crimes and follies can extirpate”. Macneill’s words are a reminder of the essential truth that the obsession with numbers destroys: you can be lost among thousands or you can find yourself in the company of a few. One of Edinburgh’s (and the market’s) enticements is that real, vivid life is always elsewhere. But as in Cavafy’s poem “The City”, what people find will also be what they bring with them.
The quality of experience is the key to everything, and it lies within and between people. Even the incessant, amplified din around Stevenson’s precipitous city this Hogmanay will not have drowned the longing for acquaintance, to share a cup of kindness, in every beating heart.
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