3...2...1...1...Happy New Year

Did you know that 2008, the year of highs - Obama, Tina Fey, Fleet Foxes, the Boston Celtics winning the NBA title, the On the Road manuscript making its way to the UK for the first time - and lows - economic meltdown, Sarah Palin, Mumbai terrorism, Boris Johnson's election - will last a little longer this year? Apparently there will be a 'leap second' added to official scientific atomic clocks around the globe to account for the Earth's varying rotation. Even Big Ben will be adjusted. I haven't yet figured out how I will spend that extra second. If past New Year's Eve midnights are any guide, projectile vomiting.

I see Big Ben almost every day, and every time I pass I think of my brother. For a number of years when we were growing up, if you happened to ask him the time, he would refuse to tell you saying with a NYC accent, 'What am I, Big fuckin' Ben?'

I do find myself getting a bit soppy at New Year's when I read those 'celebrities who kicked the bucket' annal round-ups, feeling inexplicable pangs of sadness for people who don't mean anything to me at all. I mean, god rest Eartha Kitt, but I probably haven't spared a thought about her since catching one of her Batman reruns ten years ago (and, quite frankly, I preferred Julie Newmar's Catwoman), but there I was, feeling all blue about losing her on Christmas Day. I guess death unites us all.

But there are other folk that I think the world is poorer for their absence. So adieu David Foster Wallace, Paul Newman, Studs Terkel, Bo Diddley, Bettie Page, Albert Hoffmann and Harold Pinter. Still, there are others who stuck around far too long: hope you're roasting in hell, Jesse Helms. Incidentally, I was in the National Portrait Gallery yesterday and expected to see a crowd paying homage to Justin Mortimer's rather sombre Pinter portrait. Alas, he was competing with the nearby Sam Taylor-Wood video installation of David Beckham sleeping; I was the only one venerating the great playwright.

As for your Expat, well it was a great year professionally and I am looking forward to 2009 with confidence, hope and optimism (but the ketamine is just kicking in). But I hope all y'all are too.