HELLO one and all and a happy New Year to you. Actually, am I still okay to say happy New Year on January 13? Well I suppose it is my first column of 2017 and let’s be honest, the wintry weather conditions outside suggest more like Merry Christmas, so I think I’ll just about get away with it.

I hope you all had a wonderful time over the festive period, I had a beautiful Christmas with my family and then my fiancé and I (oh I love to squeeze that in whenever I can) went to Copenhagen for New Year and it was possibly the most magical trip I’ve ever taken.

We had no idea what to expect and booked it on a bit of a whim to be honest, but it completely exceeded all expectations.

Growing up in Glasgow, Hogmanay was always spent at home with my family, which involved my mother and father cleaning the house from top to toe before getting us all dressed up in our finery for the bells.

The table would be laid out for the steak pie and every imaginable type of bun would be there along with the obligatory shortbread of course, as we waited for our tall dark-haired first footer to come through the door after midnight bringing gifts of coal and whisky.

When I got older and had my own flat, Hogmanay was about going out with my friends and trying to recreate that Hollywood version of New Year’s Eve. You know, that one where you’re at the perfect party, with the perfect man and he’s gazing so lovingly into your eyes and is about to tell you he loves you just as the room begins the big count down to the bells? Yeah that one, although of course that was never the reality.

No, the reality was we’d be out in the pouring rain at a street party, getting chatted up by men who’d started drinking on Boxing Day and we would then have to either walk the 45 minutes home again in high heels because you couldn’t get a taxi for love nor money, or if you did manage to get a taxi, you had to pay three times the amount it would normally cost because you and your pals were a bit worse for wear and the driver wanted a small fortune to take you four miles home.

We tried lots of different things over the years, but the problem was there was just always too much expected from New Year’s Eve, and no matter how hard we tried, it just never lived up to the hype.

THIS year was totally different however. We flew out of Edinburgh on December 30, slightly exhausted as I’d been working right up until December 29.

This left me with zero time to really research Copenhagen,

so we just decided to go with the flow on this trip and see what happened.

From the moment we arrived

I knew this was going to be a wonderful few days.

We hopped on a train at

the airport and three stops

and 15 minutes later we were

at our accommodation, which

was just beautiful and

everything you’d want from a Scandinavian hotel, and so

centrally located.

The next day we did the tour bus, which I loved, and even got to see the famous Little Mermaid statue from the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

We got back to our hotel in time for dinner and then got our glad rags on to see in the New Year at Tivoli Gardens.

It was like nothing I’d ever

seen before and apparently Walt Disney based his Disney World theme parks on Tivoli after he secretly visited the gardens in the 1950s.

Just before the bells we

watched the incredible fireworks display, while sipping away

on mugs of mulled wine before

the big count down into the new year.

IT was without a doubt the best Hogmanay I’ve had in a very long time and we did it all without planning a single moment of it. Maybe that’s the secret, maybe setting the bar so high and putting so much pressure on one single night of the year is where I’ve been going wrong?

Hogmanay should be about reflection on the year gone by, the good and the bad and looking forward to the upcoming year and thinking about all your hopes and dreams for the future and not focusing everything on a 10-second countdown, which doesn’t really mean anything.

I had the most wonderful 2016 and the end was so fitting, snuggled up in Tivoli Gardens watching fireworks. Here’s to a wonderful 2017 for us all because we all, each of us, deserve it.