I AM BY NATURE an adventurous soul, daring even to go shopping on Christmas Eve (provided I can't come up with a good excuse). But there are things I will never do, like take a rattlesnake to lunch, or board a grizzly, or buy a Tina Turner album. Or - and this takes precedence - venture more than 17 inches beyond my front door on New Year's Eve.

Ebenezer Scrooge was all wrong in picking on Christmas - it was for New Year's that he should have reserved his supplies of Bah! Humbug! In 20th century London, Bob Cratchet would be drowning his troubles in tequilas, the coal lady passed out on the barroom floor, and Tiny Tim caning passers-by for a few pence to foot his Ecstasy bill.

Over the years, I have hoisted many a vat of Scotch in bars, bistros and pubs all over this planet, for most if not all of 364 days of any year. But not never no-how on the 365th - New Year's Eve - for as any self-respecting boozer will tell you, that is amateur's night out, and the professionals wisely steer well clear.

This is the occasion when every secretary who hasn't touched more than two glasses of wine in any given week decides she is perfectly capable of downing the annual output of three French vineyards in one go, the boss decides his secretary is worth the risk of alimony, and the put-upon office milquetoast decides to have a few words with the boss - thereby guaranteeing himself a mid-life career change in about two days' time.

Only cops with truncheons, paramedics with industrial-sized supplies of bandages and sutures and skins like an elephant's epidermis, and street cleaners who are paid to wade through oceans of secretarial barf dare venture out into the resulting chaos.

This year had threatened to be the worst of all time, or at least in the last 100 years, because of the M word - the Millennium, the great numbers game in which, golly, gee, we will actually change all four digits in the year's changeover, instead of the customary one or two, or on the odd occasion, three.

And that, dear reader, is why - in addition to my usual stoic view of the event - that Id prefer to put my private parts through a 1945 Bendix washing machine wringer than go anywhere near the rest of mankind on New Year's Eve. We shall be observing the arrival of the new year, the new century and the new millennium behind firmly closed curtains.

The fact is, I refuse to take out a second mortgage on the cottage or a usurious loan from the Bank of Scotland to pay for badly prepared dinners that my cats would turn their noses up at, a few watered-down Scotches and the right to be elbowed, jostled, punched and thrown up on by strangers whom I'd lief invite to a picnic on a quicksand bog.

Money, indeed, is the name of the game. The mercantile world has interpreted the turnover of the mileage on the chronological clock from 1999 to 2000 as a license for legalized pickpocketing on a global scale. Twirl that mustache, and no guns needed.

In London, travel companies put rockets on their prices and offered limited edition Millennium packages for $16,000 or more. Baby-sitters were offering their services for up to $1,500 for New Year's Eve. The Bear Inn, a run-of-the-mill English inn in Woodstock, will give you a bed for the night, plus dinner and breakfast, for $560.

The Bear's price was actually reasonable. Back in London, at the Ritz Hotel, the prices were befitting this establishment's name - up to $12,800 for a double room (and that didn't include so much as a half-bottle of mineral water). For luxuries like food on New Year's Eve, be prepared to cough up another $2,000 or so - for one person, one dinner.

(And when writer Angela Lambert got the registration form, she found she was supposed to return it with a 50 percent deposit and the balance by Oct. 31 - non-refundable, in case we died of excitement beforehand, she presumed.)

It was greed on a grand scale - but greed can be a double-edged sword. Now, suddenly, the other edge is swinging back, and many an avaricious head may be about to roll. Hoteliers and restaurants and travel agencies and entertainment impresarios, who doled out thousands of dollars for food, drink, entertainment and beds in anticipation of untold riches to come once 1999 became 2000, are staring into the abyss of a financial shambles.

What they have tried to do is throw an expensive party, only to find no one wants to come. Millennium or no, few people intend to pay to become victims of daylight - or nightlight - banditry. People are staying at home, watching it all on TV, even yodeling off-key renditions of the dread-awful Scottish ditty Auld Lang Syne. What the hell, it's free.

Meanwhile, by one reliable estimate, fully 70 percent of these special Millennium events in Britain are still moldering in their brochures, as one critic put it, or are offering their wares/services/entertainment at panic prices - sometimes as much as 80 percent off - on the theory that a little something is better than an awful lot of nothing.

Says a gloomy Mark Fuller, joint owner of Sugar Reef, billed as London's biggest eatery: "New Year's Eve is not going to happen. We have a 1,000-seat restaurant, and we've taken barely 100 bookings."

Misery does love company. An unprecedented number of restaurants are closing, Fuller says. And what does it all mean? We're in for the worst New Year's Eve trade ever. It's grim as hell. (Exeunt Stage Left, cue chuckles of glee from Impoverished Masses).

Nigel Tarr and his wife also own their restaurant, but they say they don't want to put upon staff who may have wanted the night off, and besides which there were those customers who weren't sure what they wanted to do.

So the Tarrs are off backpacking to Sweden, to be drinking from hip flasks and eating smoked reindeer instead. The Webbs and their four cats are toasting tootsies in front of a log fire, watching some old Millennium rubbish on TV, at no charge (well, maybe a couple of pennies for the electricity).

And in the background, ever so softly, the sound of greed, turning full circle. . .

Thought for the Week: Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you are the statue.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: