This new year of 2021 brings change to Ulster like barely other any since this newspaper began reporting in 1737

When the News Letter was launched in September 1737, the new year began in March.

It is hard for us today to get our head round that old calendar, because it was such a different way of thinking.

The old way of dating the year went from December 31 1737 to January 1 1737, then January 2 1737, and so on, all the way to March 24 1737, after which it changed to March 25 1738.

This is why a News Letter from early March 1738 is wrongly thought to be the oldest surviving copy. In fact, it is from what we would consider to be March 1739. A News Letter from October 1738 is in fact the oldest. It is from what was considered 1738 then, and still considered 1738 today.

Confused? Well so were News Letter staff in 1838. They too thought the March 1738 paper was the oldest and reproduced it as such a century later. And why would they not have been confused? After all, the old calendar changed to the new (current) one in 1752. By 1838 barely a person alive remembered the old style. They would have needed to be well over 90 to have been able to comprehend and remember the old dating.

In those first News Letters, some people were already celebrating new year in January but most people in March. The ‘new style’ was being adopted by sections of society, even in advance of the formal 1752 change.

We wish our readers a happy new year today, the first day of 2021, as we have done in the new year since the 1730s, albeit for a time in March. This though is a new year like few others.

In 1801, as Jim Allister observes opposite, the year began with the Act of Union, a stunningly effective piece of legislation. For more than 200 years it has held together the four nations of the UK (the Irish part much diminished since 1921).

It will take many years to understand the Irish Sea border that came in at 11pm last night. It is not a good development for unionism. The only uncertainty is how bad it will be.

Unionists are always told that they must concede things to secure their position and if that is true in this case then it is yet possible that it will ultimately help to secure the Union.

On this annual date of looking forward, we can only clutch at the hope that there is some truth in that analysis.

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