And come up with a wish list of things we might like to see happen in the year to come. So, in that spirit, with a glass of something cheerful to hand, and Noddy Holder screaming in my ear, I thought I’d write about death.

In Scotland, a lot of us have what you could probably call a morbid fascination with the subject. With every day that goes by, and with the inevitable deaths of those closest to us, we accept the fact that our own demise is creeping ever closer and that we are moving up towards the front of the bus.

But rather than cower in fear and close our minds to the big sleep, we make jokes about it. We sit in the pub and compare what songs we’d like played at our funerals, almost always with the slightly lubricated and deluded mindset that.

Elaborate images of what imagines that we’ll be able to hear them. We laugh about those of us who imbibe far more alcohol than is good for us and how long it will take for the flames to die down once we’ve been sent down the chute behind the final curtain. our funerals will look like are also conjured up.

For example, a Viking funeral where the body is laid out on pallets and sent out from the blue bridge at the Shore into the Firth of Forth while the mourners fire flaming arrows at it from the deck of the Fingal hotel. What could possibly go wrong?

We wonder what our famous last words will be and dig up memories of some of the best ones. These include the comedian W C Fields, a lifelong atheist who was on his deathbed when a friend came to visit and found him reading a bible. When he asked him what he was doing, Field’s apparently said “looking for loopholes.”

The drummer Buddy Rich was being looked after by a new nurse who was preparing his medicines when she asked him if there was anything he couldn’t take; “Yeah, country music.” The ones that resonate most with me were uttered by the birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger who, just before she closed her eyes and drifted off shouted “A party! Let’s have a party!”

But here’s the thing. We don’t need to die so that a party can be held without us. Every single one of us is already at the party, right here and right now. Obviously, if you have an unshakeable faith that our life on earth is not the end of us and our souls are transported to a teetotal celestial shindig, then you will have a very different outlook. And I am genuinely glad for you if that’s your view.

But for the rest of us, this is it. And we should take pleasure in the smallest of things and in the most majestic things that surround us. And we should do it now. Yes, I know that parts of the world are on fire at the moment and the daily lives of millions of people are as far away from a party as they could possibly be, but we have to have hope that things will turn around and even the tiniest ray of light should give us that hope.

In the midst of Donald Trump’s poisonous right-wing administration, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist was just elected as Mayor of New York City. One of the things that Zohran Mamdani said was that the policies he will put forward are an “existential threat to a broken status quo that buries the voices of working people beneath corporations.”

That’s hopeful, no? Surgeons from Scotland and Dundee have recently used robot technology to carry out a world-first procedure which removes blood clots from stroke victims and can be utilised remotely, even transatlantically. If approved, it will be a game-changer in terms of the recovery chances for victims. All happening at our party.

So, as I write, there are only forty five days until Christmas. By my reckoning, and only if I’m spared of course, that means another forty four parties before the big day. So don’t wait; get dancing now. Because when the music stops, it really stops and the party goes on without you.

And death? It’s not scary, it’s just a jumped up party-pooper.