This follows on from my entry on the Happy New Year thread, where I said I spent New Year's eve in London, but stopped there as otherwise I'd have come over as all 'Grumpy Old Woman' and everyone else was soooo happy.
But this is MY thread, where I'm allowed to be as grumpy as I damn well like, so read on or log off!

For some reason - probably the fact I had underage sprogs with me - my original idea of going to the 100 Club in Oxford street, booze-dancing to my favourite Jump Jive band and then unsuccessfully attempting to seduce the trumpeter (again - last time was in 2005, if I remember) was off the menu, so we headed off to London to join the crowds in Trafalgar square, count down the chimes of Big Ben and have a quick Auld Lang Syne round the Christmas tree.

Yeah. As if. The last time I did that was when I was a kid myself. Things have changed since then. We now have President Ken and his loyal team of Woodentops (in Thursday World, Spec Ops div. 3475 and counting, by my reckoning) 'organising' us all. With his usual applomb and effectiveness, naturallenot.

Still, I wasn't to know the 100 turns a blind eye to underage clubbers if they know the band, was I?
It started off promisingly enough - folk in ffunny hats alcopopping merrily on the Victoria train, etc - but once there a quick query at the ticket office (lovely people, definitely in my 'Good guy/gal/but far too low paid Heroic' category) revealed that Trafalgar Square was Officially Closed. Yep. Cordoned off. As was the rest of Central London, apart from the few square metres set aside as the Offfficial Viewing Area for Sir Ken's ffu - sorry, ffestivities.

Thus I, plus three youngsters - including a somewhat vulnerable 8 year old, of whom there were many, plus a good few even younger - battled to get to the core of ffestivities. Plenty of time to reach the ffireworks, the ticket man said. But we weren't there for the ruddy fireworks. Except we were because, like everyone else getting off a train in London, we were being told - or rather, directed, by President Ken and his team of Doddsworths (aka the Woodentops, aka the Met police) to go where he wanted us to. Namely, the event he'd arranged, and got the London taxpayers to fork out £1.5 million for. Now how Goliath is THAT?

Still, off we went, along with a million or so others. I was all for going home but the kids wanted to see the fireworks - not realising it would be impossible to do so, unless you were in a police helicopter or the middle of the Thames. Oblivious, along with a million or so other families being 'directed' to the worst viewing area in London. Nicely planned that. Evidently deliberate since, even though we were faithfully promised Ken's Noddies were'in charge' of crowd control, we all ended up in a one-way crush of bodies, unable to veer off across the myriad, strangely deserted, greens and park areas that would provide rapid access to the bit the BBC were filming. Eventually, we ended up at 11.58 pm in exactly the right place to a) see, but not be able to hear, the chimes of Big Ben happening b) Hear, but not be able to see, the amazing billion-squid-spent-unwisely firework display over the London Eye c) hear, see, feel, smell and get bruised/squashed/kissed/thumped by the billion or so others who had also unwisely chosen to set off for Uncle Ken's Homestead 6 hours, rather than 6 days, prior to the event.

So - BBC1 on half a dozen big screens (a totally non-political event, of course, no corporate funding and oh, boy, how totally NOT New Labour) a huge cheer from those still able to breathe, to a background of an eerily silent Big Ben, a few thunderclaps that I took to be the rain worsening, but turned out to be the final fusillade of rockets and roman candles from the firework display, not a sniff of Auld Lang Syne ... and all'organised' by our glorious FFuhrer - sorry, Lord Mayor - and his henchmen.
By 12.10 it was all over. At 1.15 am the men in yellow jackets were still turning us away from crossing the barriers with 'No entry to the firework' notices on them.
There were good bits. I'm still picking them out of my hair.

I am really sorry that Ken prat spoiled your new year like that! Twat! Doesn't bode well for 2012! I just spent a quiet night at home and made lentil soup for the fella who was meeting me mammy the next day (poor guy ended up meeting a lot more than just mum!) and I watched the DVD of Eragon which suited me fine. I am sorry that you went to all of that effort and the bleeding red tape brigade got all officious! Better luck next year!

:)

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.

Sounds like the fireworks the local kids have been letting off all week would have been a better show. Sorry to hear about it!

Still, when the APEC meeting was on, the locals were instructed NOT to watch the fireworks as they were for the visiting APEC representatives only.

So you're still a step up from that!

PrinzHilde Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> 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.

Oooh Oooh I wanna hear the one about the midget policwoman on the polo pony!

{jumps up and down!}

That sounds like a good story!!!

I saw the repeats Jazz Sue, I think "Fan-bluddy-ffastic" sums it up quite well! Quite simply some of the best comedy I've ever seen and the only program ever to make me laugh so hard I couldn't actually breathe.

Sorry to hear about your evening- let it all out and then start planning a happier one for next year. Especially when your outpourings are that amusing! :)

I wanna hear about it too!
Please??? We promise to be good.
Well, good*er*

That might be relative, but it still worries me....

Was that a resolution Kitten dear?

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Sue: you can fell pretty safe in calling someone a noddie when he has to look up the word in the dictionary first...

And I wasn't in the least thinking about some "terrorist threat" as the reason behind security measures. (There might be a considerable difference between London's and Berlin's way of thinking and the way security forces act. The last big bomb explosion was twenty years ago. Different times, then.)

What I had in mind were the highlights of popular culture* of recent years - the Love Parade of the nineties (one million people pretending to dance to techno "music") or the Fan Mile of the football world cup (up to half a million people per day waving flags in front of outdoor TV screens).

I learned from these sorts of events: They get in the way. Of everything. Everyone not taking part or involved in relieving the participants of their money has serious problems not being trampled over, inundated with paraphernalia (flags, fake feather boas) or shouted at just because it seems funny at the time. I remember a newspaper trying, just for the heck of it, on the day of the Love Parade, to get a pizza delivered to their offices from a shop that was at the opposite side of the parade grounds. After four hours, they gave up waiting. Taxi services going in a north-south direction were practically suspended for the whole day.

There is just no way any policing would have made the least difference.

OK, I did get a bit off-topic here. Anyway, the best way to spend new years' eve in my opinion is: Avoid moving through the streets between 9 PM and 2 AM. Meet with a few friends for a small party. Go outside at midnight to clink champagner bottles with all the neighbours, shiver in the cold and gawk at everyone else acting silly with their fireworks.

*They must have been highlights. Otherwise not so many people would have attended.

I've really enjoy reading Jazz Sue's contributions, for what it's worth. Well written, splattered with irony and superb comic timing throughout. Let's have more like that.

I like that resolution, Ptolemy and I agree Jazz's posts are terrific!

*edited to add that I think everyone's posts are terrific, really



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2008 10:23AM by OC Not.

Grumpy New Year's stories? Everybody's posts are terrific? OK, here's one...

I wanted to bring in this year lying in bed, watching movies with my bf-
instead, he had to go back to his old store & pick up a bag of beef because his supervisor cut his order short & they ran out, so...

<just realized I should probably explain that the bf manages a Domino's & the beef was for pizza>

At midnght, we were in a gas station parking lot- we were together & did kiss but-
still haven't had time or inclination to watch a single one of the DVDs we bought on New Year's Eve!

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You decide:

[www.myspace.com]

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I remember a Love Parade in Berlin in the 90s. I was only newly-arrived in Germany, knowing very little of the language, and expecting to be in Hamburg but having to go to Berlin to drop off a 3.5" diskette and finding myself caught in the crowds, completely lost and having loaned my German-English dictionary to an Estonian at a music festival some months earlier (if you're reading this Mr Pärt, might as well consider it a gift...). So my presence could be added to the attendance list, but it wasn't my purpose in being there. I managed to find my way out of the crowd in time and I think my ears stopped ringing within 72 hours.

Arvo Pärt? Wow, you've got interesting acquaintances...

So.... You have a bone to pick with a Pärt?

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

More a song to sing...you might like to look him up.

Ok, perhaps I will be shouted down here but, I just don't get New Year.

Why is the fact that the earth has travelled around the sun again such a big deal? It's been doing it for millions of years.

Why is getting drunk with thousands of strangers in public places acceptable on the 31st of December and not at any other time of the year?

Perhaps someone should start ordering the fireworks because the 31st of January is only 23 days away!!!

And hello!?!?! there was no year zero, so the new millenium began 01/01/2001 not 2000!?!?!? (That has been annoying me for the last eight years! I don't think anyone mentioned it here, but it's my rant, and I will rant about whatever I like.)

<gasps and draws breath before beginning a new rant>

<realises that she must be a grumpy old woman>

<realises she is only 38>

<sighs>

Ooh Ptolemy, you delight me!
I actually want to get paid for my writing one day, but because it started out as a therapeutic exercise against everything that was wrong in my life, 4 years ago, everything I've written since seems to have a laconic twist, even when I'm writing about the good times (I did enjoy New Year's Eve, honest, but since these were mainly the moments spent in quiet harmony with my children it would probably be very boring, if short.) To be honest, this is the best forum I've ever been on, and that includes the Terry Pratchett ones. It was the high quality of writing (something along the lines that 'The Master' might be listening in I'd guess) that tempted me to log on and get typing in the first place. The manic thing is, I don't have to embellish the facts to tell the story - if anything, I have to shave bits off. Weird life.
Not too hot with the puter though. Having just spent half an hour on a lovely bit about the policewoman and her candy coloured pony, I somehow hit the wrong button and deleted the lot. Too hungry to repeat the process right now, but it's coming, don't worry!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/10/2008 06:56PM by Jazz_Sue.

Interesting acquaintance...oh, I wish! Unfortunately, just attending the same music festival and queued up behind him in the cafeteria midway through rehearsals and saw him struggling with a food order, so offered the German-English dictionary I'd been carrying around just in case I bumped into him. It has my name on the flyleaf, so I suppose I could claim that I gave him my autograph.

Sue, be careful about wanting to get paid for your writing: I've always said that and am now employed to produce local government committee minutes. The Fates have a strange sense of humour.