Well then – I'm the sort of dull, insignificant person who usually spends the evening at home, with my partner, fairly quietly, doing fairly dull, insignificant things like watching television or a film, listening to music, reading, reminiscing… with an almost inaudible clinking of glasses (or, indeed, teacups…) at midnight, followed by a minor flurry of phone-calls and text messages. Boring, right? Old before our time? The human equivalent of a pair of bedroom slippers?

And yet, would the prescribed festivity make the date any more significant? I've been there – I remember many New Year's Eves in crowded bars, complete with anonymous hugs from drunken strangers. "Randomers", as teenagers call them nowadays.

People bellow out the words of Auld Lang Syne as part of the midnight ritual – but how many actually know what it means? "We'll have a friendly drink for old time's sake", roughly translates the most famous lines of the song from Robert Burns' Scots dialect.

The rest of the song talks of friends separated and old connections renewed and really – for all that Robbie Burns himself by all accounts was partial to a "dram" of whisky – seems to have very little to do with the drunken anonymity of the typical New Year's Eve embrace. But I don't avoid it because I think I'm better than that – not at all – I avoid it because New Year's Eve always makes me feel sad – sombre – and I have no desire to cloud anyone else's festivities by emerging as some kind of shadowy ghost of human doom, sitting in a corner looking sad and thoughtful.

New Year's Eve. It's a punctuation mark in our story. A full stop – an ellipsis – a question mark, even. To go out and celebrate full-throttle would turn it into the kind of thoughtless exclamation mark which would make the whole experience reflection-free. Maybe no bad thing, it might be argued… but if we're going to first-foot our way into the new year, surely we should be thinking just a bit about the experiences and the lessons and the people of the year we're leaving behind?

I went to the cinema one evening recently, to see the film PS I love you. I went partly out of curiosity, partly because it's good to get out to the cinema after the rituals – lovely though they are – of a family Christmas.

All around me in the packed cinema, through the apparently endless adverts, were groups of female friends who all seemed to be discussing their plans for New Year's Eve. Venues had been booked. Taxis had been booked. Babysitters or mothers had been bribed in advance. Now it was down to the serious business: what to wear. There was a lot at stake here: it was like, really important that no two young women in a group should emerge onto a New Year's Eve dancefloor wearing the same outfit.

Wardrobe details were being divulged and discussed with all the precision of a military operation. "You wear your black dress from Warehouse, and I'll wear my Oasis one and then Jane can wear her one from Next. Because like, it'll be so not good if we like, both wear the Oasis one." "Aye. You're right. Death, like. Death in a dress. And that's so not cool."

So much trouble – for one evening. One evening when the revellers will be systematically ripped off, pushed, shoved, offered a drunken grope by a shifty-looking stranger, and will feel exhausted and somehow irretrievably disappointed the next morning.

I suppose I'm taking an excessively judgemental attitude to all this. There's nothing at all wrong with an inconsequential night out of merry-making, dressed up: anticipated, enjoyed and recovered from. But do I really want to begin the next year of my life by waking up with a headache and bruises and sore feet?

As for the film I went to see that night? PS: it's cheesy. The central premise of the plot - young couple torn apart when he dies young of a brain tumour; he leaves her twelve months' worth of letters to help her get on with her life; the usual cast of entertaining friends and family – is perfectly all right. A bit sad, maybe: there is the possibility of a genuinely moving film, but the thing is: I just couldn't connect with any of the characters. We get a Ronseal heroine: she does exactly what it says on the tin.

She's beautiful; she cries a lot; she's funny; she's ultimately redeemed her situation by the end of the film. The husband dies within the first five minutes so appears mainly in flashbacks: as a supposed Irishman he has the single most ludicrous impression of an Oirish accent I have ever heard. If I'd met him I wouldn't have fallen in love, despite his charm, good looks and great singing voice. I'd have burst out laughing and then run away. Alongside these two we get all the expected elements: the seemingly abrupt, emotionless mother with a soft centre, the "mad" female friends, the supportive male friend who just might be a new love interest but isn't, and the New Irishman. Yes. She and the mad friends go to Ireland (as organised by the dead husband while he was still the living husband) and she has an encounter with another singing Irishman who also has the ridiculous accent she seems to find so irresistible, who looks a bit like a yellow-pack George Clooney. At the very end of the film she's reunited with the New Irishman, and you can practically see the pigs being herded out of the kitchen to make room for her to get her feet under the table…

As I watched the film and counted off the clichés until I ran out of fingers a few times over, I could hear assorted sniffles and one or two outright sobs from all around me in the darkened cinema. I was sniffing as well, but only because I was sitting right under the air-conditioning vent and it was giving me a cold. I began to wonder whether I'm just some sort of heart-hardened cynic who doesn't know true emotion when I see it – in the same way as I'm some kind of Grinch whose only New Year's Eve wardrobe choice is whether to put on something sparkly with my jeans for staying in, or whether just to give up completely and see the New Year in wearing my pyjamas. Or perhaps it's not a question of being boring, or of heartless cynicism: maybe I just think much too deeply about things?

Maybe I should just get on with celebrating the beginning of a new year and stop wondering about what it holds in store for us all – good or bad, joy or tragedy? But somehow it's not as easy to change a predilection for thinking about things until they separate into meaningless component atoms as it is to change into a different little black dress, so that you won't be wearing the same thing as your friend on your big night out. And somehow I suspect that I'll always view New Year's Eve as a night of seriousness, not mirth.

We face the new year like the lone surfer who makes his approach to the towering white foam of a winter wave. He looks insignificant – a tiny black figure in the swirling water, the wave magnificent as it towers above him, preparing, reaching, curling. As the wave breaks, the surfer knows what to do.

He has his board ready – he slides upwards through the water and gets ready to stand. If skill and luck are on his side he'll have that incredible moment when he's up there, aloft, riding the wave… until it throws him and he's down again, paddling, gasping, defeated and exhilarated at the same time. Away from the waves, as midnight passes, we're in just the same situation. The year ahead is towering above us. It's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. All the months and weeks and days are amassing their strength and their possibilities above us – beyond us. We don't know what these days have in store for us. No amount of time spent reading horoscopes or predictions or previews can really tell us.

Sure: we can read about what might happen. Anticipate the books we might read, the albums we might listen to, the films we might see. But we can never know the friends we might make or lose, the births or deaths we might witness, the illnesses or accidents or happinesses or sadnesses which we'll be thinking back upon in exactly a year's time. But like the lone surfer, we just have to put into practice everything we've learned before – follow the routine we know.

Put our defences up and try to keep standing. It's every bit as inevitable, though, that we'll end up falling – failing – flailing. And it's inevitable too that when that happens, we'll keep fighting and struggling and trying to keep on.

But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne…

As Robbie Burns tells us: broad seas have roared between us since times gone by. And the waves will continue to break before us and around us as we move ahead.

And to ride the waves even for a moment, don't we have to think about how we did it all before?