The end of the year grants us the opportunity to look back and remember which celebrities have died. That’s the truth. We like our death filtered through the spectacle of obscene wealth and fame and obscured by the low resolution of paparazzi images. We hold death at the distance of Myth, in order to comprehend it. And then we have a party and get really messed up.

New Year’s Eve is by definition, a funeral ritual, the means by which we sublimate our fear of death. It is our little Armageddon, where we rehearse the end of time. Even the annual firework display, seems to anticipate some spectacle of devastation, enclosing whole bridges in fire and smoke. Perhaps this is why I am clinically terrified of New Year's Eve, and why I haven’t really enjoyed it since 1991, when I was allowed to stay up and watch Clive James on television talking about which celebrities died during the year. It was the only day, as far as I can remember, on which I was allowed to watch T.V., a novelty that I’m still excited about.

The other day in Portugal, thousands of octopuses enacted their own little Armageddon, by washing up dead along a stretch of beach some 5 miles long. “Authorities have warned the public not to eat them.” A volcano, in other news, is threatening villagers and chimpanzees in the Congo with ash and molten lava. In this slightly morbid mood, such news put me in mind of a strange little Werner Herzog documentary my family and I watched this Christmas Eve, instead of going to midnight mass. “Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster” is Herzog at his most mythic, trespassing through a deserted Caribbean island town in the shadow of a smoldering volcano. Donkeys and dogs have taken over the streets. The traffic lights continue to change, a television plays from an abandoned house, but the rest of the town is eerily empty, silent, like some sort of science fiction set. Every boat has left the harbour, but the water, so we are told, is full of snakes that fled the mountains and threw themselves into the sea, to drown.

In 1902 the same volcano, La Soufriere, emitted identical warning signs before it wiped out the entire population, bar one. The only survivor ironically, so Hertzog tells us, was a criminal, “the badest guy in the Town” who was protected from the blast by the walls of his solitary confinement cell. The lucky man spent the next miserable years of his life as a touring curiosity. Herzog discovers three similar characters in the present tense who have decided, out of poverty or madness or profound spiritual acceptance, to stay behind and face their inevitable death. One such man lies under a tree with a cat, at the base of the Volcano. “God takes us all to him, not just me” he tells Herzog. “Why should I be afraid?”

Profound spiritual acceptance is something I tried practicing this New Years Eve. It’s like when the plane wobbles 33 000 feet above the earth, and your heart skips its beat and you’re able to think, for the longest second, “here it is, my death, welcome.” This year I didn’t get messed up. I stood on a beach in Wilson’s Promontory and watched the sky blacken, watched the pink lightning pulse on the horizon. When it grew dark we drove home through the blackness, slowly enough to avoid wombats, but too fast to avoid the frogs, as the road steamed in the rain. Then we watched channel nine present the Sydney Fireworks, the two onscreen presenters like Emissaries from hell. Afterwards, we lit sparklers and some sort of animal made a noise like a horse breathing heavily in the bush beside us. Then we went to bed and dreamt and woke up in the new decade.