Happy New Year

I wanted to get on here before 1pm so that I could do a Happy New Year from Nuzziland in 2008 while the UK was still in 2007 but sleeping in late and then tidying up the house after last night's little get-together meant I didn't manage it. But anyhow, happy new year everyone.

Well, the party seemed to go well last night. It wasn't quite on the scale on previous London ones (10 people made it along as opposed to the 40 or so we've had along to previous ones) but it was a select group (Steve & Lisa, Simon & Rebekah, Kirsty, Anthony, Blair & Amy, Sarah and Gabi) and at least we now have laid the foundations for future years. We've a big house and we want to fill it.

There were a couple of big differences we noticed last night between UK NYE and NZ NYE. Firstly, and it's more a general cultural thing rather than a specific NYE thing, but in the UK if you invite people over at 7:30pm there is kind of an expectation of some sort of supper being served. In Nuzziland, if you invite people over at 7:30pm they eat before they come. Hence, we over-catered. We had over-catered, as usual, but seeing that no-one came hungry, we over-catered in a big, big way. The second difference concerns the countdown to midnight, specifically the countdown on TV. In the UK every single channel has some sort of countdown, be it Beeb1 and ITV's mainstream countdown, Channel 4's alternative countdown or even Jools and his hootenanny on Beeb2. They all countdown to the new year. And then there will be fireworks galore, both outside and on the TV. Here, last night, for a brief moment we thought we had the wrong night. There was no countdown, just Elton John's birthday concert and the concert for Diana, some films and the usual late night TV stuff. Not a countdown or a firework in sight. Even outside we struggled to see more than a bit of a flash off in the sky in the distance to indicate someone else somewhere was celebrating the arrival of 2008. Thus we had we make up our own countdown which was definitely late as we struggled to get a concensus on the actual time. But 2008 arrived all the same, so it wasn't a world-ending problem. I just needed some sense of order and to be told when to cheer by some grinning couple on television.