So I would be lucky in the new year. On a New Year’s Eve when 13 changed into 14, a day after Hunkemöller had drawn my attention to a new but old tradition, my naivety easily won out over my reason. There I was, standing in my new red lingerie (hidden under a dress, it’s true). Just a day before I was to enter the New Year, I had not yet known that red lingerie is supposed to bring good luck and happiness. But so open-mindedly did I embrace this ancient custom that it should have brought me extra good luck!
I don’t like New Year’s Eve. Never have. Our greatest shared talent – seeing what we don’t have – which we have all just spent a year doing a pretty good job of suppressing, always floats to the surface sometime during my third glass of champagne. By the first sip of my fourth glass, I can no longer ignore the miserable psychoanalyses of my single female neighbours and the freshly married men already letting their gazes fall on new flesh. It is all so sad that the fifth glass slides down effortlessly. Champagne finished, lights on.
A few of these New Year’s Eves later and you decide to do things differently. To spend the night alone with your love in front of the fire. Or with your ‘inner circle’ on a mountain in the French Pyrenees under the stars, surrounded by sheep. Or at a party in promising red lingerie. And yes, Hunkemöller was not lying. Red lingerie really does bring you happiness. That realisation only came later. Because the thing is, after all those New Year’s Eves, happiness is no longer found in a set of red lingerie and two strange, beautiful hands to tear it from your body, but in something quite different. It is found in today, the lightest day of the year: 1 January 2014. I leap out of bed, ready for a new beginning.
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