Re: New Year memories
Posted by:
Jazz_Sue (212.85.12.---)
Date: January 03, 2008 05:57PM
PrinzHilde Wrote:
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> So you really think one million people trying to
> get in one place could be organised better? I'd
> say give your (your? or do you live outside the
> city?) mayor some leeway...not financially.
> Spending public money on this kind of event is
> quite absurd. Comparable events in Berlin are
> organised privately, and the organizers even have
> to pay for the cleanup afterwards. Easyly to
> refund from TV rights.
>
> But to close off parks? That one I can understand.
> Here those mega-events are normally held in a
> street that goes right through the middle of the
> Tiergarten, the biggest park area the city has.
> Along the street, on a stretch of 2 km the street
> is completely fenced in. Try to imagine hundreds
> of thousends of people stumbling through the
> brushes at dark...not pretty, at the least.
> Dangerous on several levels, for sure.
>
> I avoid those venues. It is always frustrating.
> You are in an annoyed mass of people trying in
> vain to get to where the action is. And really
> everyone is sure that is somewhere else. The
> result eerily resembles the U-Bahn at rushhour.
First off - this is NOT a nag, right? Just observations - the first being, why are people who are skilled in writing satire about such events revered by such as us? Never had the filmy gauze between Jasper's world and my own seemed so fragile. I had serious reservations about going the moment I saw the Maps pointing us in the direction of what, it appeared, was the only place to be - let alone get to - that night. Our original plan was to quickly catch the lights of the West End with a quick bus ride, stop off and give my Trumpeter his late Xmas present, and ride/hike/tube it to Nelson's column so we could see the New Year in and my littlest could cuddle one of the lions for luck. Things like that are important when you've just been reading about a lush called Lady Hamilton, and laughing about her antics - again - and hope, with enough practice, to be able to do the same one day. Not be a lush, or write about Lady H, just human life in general.
Guess I've been outside The Smoke for too long. See, I USED to live in S.London, a spit in the river away from Westminster - hence my in-depth (but sadly out of date) knowledge of such things as central London on New Year's eve, the lights on Oxford Street etc. On those days we didn't know who the Lord Mayor was, only that he was lower down the scale than the Monarchy (but with a lot more gold and Vermine than they've got) and that, if you missed the last bus on New Year's eve - or the last train out of town, usually three hours before the final countdown - it was a long walk home. Then I left for Surrey. Shortly after my teens. I've had two homes, 4 kids, three careers and one (failed) marriage since then ...
Or in a nutshell, my eldest kid is older than I was when I left Battersea Sarf along with the Smog, Sinclair don't do puters any more and God don't I just miss those Hansom cabs. But I digress.
I do visit Londers on a regular basis throughout the year, and apart from it being a bit more Gherkin shaped and a whole lot more cosmopolitan - and crowded as ever as a result, despite the 1980's exodus - not too much has changed. Bits of it are better (cue the Hansom biker taxi brigade and their 30p-if-they-like-you fares) The trouble is, people haven't changed that much, Gawd bless 'em all, but the society that rules them has - none more so than my fair city as was. Incidentally, my 'out-of-town' area is rapidly becoming set in concrete (we're now officially downgrading the Green Belt, as in turning it grey with brown fields) so I'm not as much a country yokel as I once liked to believe. I walked down the Strand with my Breezer in my hand, not a straw stuck out the side of my mouth!
Note I said AS crowded, not more so. And please don't take the word Cosmopolitan as a racial insult - it's not. It means more families with kiddies, and a more intelligent brand of lager lout. And getting a droopy New Year kiss from some of the sexiest accents on God's earth weren't too bad either, even if some of them WERE women. True, I forgot to bring my festive drinks with me, so had to buy my Breezers in a pub instead of an off licence (hint - buy a triple vodka in Happy Hour and a couple of easy to fill orange juice singles from a Sainsbury's Local instead, it's @#$%& and the kids get to drink half the proceeds) but apart from that, it was much as I remembered from my days at Trafalgar.
People are not lemmings, or idiots. Whoever we are and wherever we come from, we've reached the top of the evolutionary tree (so we're told) simply because we do NOT need a higher authority from the same species (or so we're told) to organise us into large groups. Despite what the Daily Snail tells us, we are not, on average, booze swilling idiots with the brain cell capacity of a squished fish egg who need serious help discovering which zipper to pee out of in public (anyone catch the seasonal repeats of Not the Nine o'clock News on Paramount Comedy? Fan-bluddy-ffastic) Neither, apart from this writer, are we gun toting anarchists. Joe Average is a hard-working/benefits claiming/all-round family good guy, not a society hating insurgent hell bent on the destruction of society/devolution of government/murdering the mayor or blowing up buses with lots of people on them. Yet.
Oh, I see, it wasn't because of the above we were all treated like potential criminals, it was cos people might be drinking. Right. Now I get it. And those who weren't allowed to had every right to get a bit huffy about it. (Another hint - save your insurgent terrorist activities till 5 minutes before count-down, when there will be a mass charge of policepeople towards the best viewing places, safe in the knowledge they will be the only ones with access to all the short cuts.)
Sure, the drunken idiots exist, and they need controlling - and in their droves on party nights - but had the Daily Snail scenario been the case we wouldn't have been tripping over broken bottles in the street at 2.30 am on January 1st, we'd have been digging out the people still submerged in them.
Shall I tell thee of the midget ploicewoman on a polo pony, and the chaos that ensued thereof? Maybe another time.
Sorry if I called you a Noddie, by the way.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/09/2008 12:53PM by Jazz_Sue.