Monday 31st December 2007
I travelled down to London today to celebrate the incoming new year. Thanks to Network Rail’s stunning foresight, the West Coast Main Line was undergoing maintenance and I was forced to take a rather convoluted route via Oxford. This was doubly infuriating since I had bought a single from Oxford when I went home last week, and with the gift of hindsight I now know that I should have bought a return. Network Rail are idiots.
We eventually set out for London town rather later than expected, getting on the Tube at Uxbridge at half past twenty. My girlfriend and I were meeting up with a friend, but she said she was going to be a bit late, so we got off at Piccadilly Circus and walked to the Thames.
The crowds started thick and got slowly thicker, everywhere peppered with fluorescent police. Eventually, after walking through an already fairly packed Trafalgar Square and taking a fruitless detour down Whitehall, we managed to find our way into the fireworks viewing area, down a road off Trafalgar Square called Northumberland Avenue. We had a lovely riverside position in full view of the London Eye. No word from our friend, though.
We’d already seen one road to the Thames closed down Whitehall, so when the flow of people down Northumberland Avenue seemed to have dried up, we walked back up to Trafalgar, where the police, previously milling about harmlessly, had assembled themselves into one of those human chains you can make by folding up a piece of paper several times and cutting out a little man shape in it.
Our friend had made it…but about two minutes too late. We could see her on the other side of the line of police. At one point I even managed to grab her hand, but no amount of charm could convince the police that, since people were streaming out of the viewing area, that perhaps one extra girl (and quite a small one at that) wouldn’t even balance out the exodus-ers, let alone cause Hillsborough II. It had echoes of crowd control in far more life-threatening situations. Had we been catching the last boat out of England, like in The War of the Worlds, or in a queue for food hand-outs, things would probably have been more serious. As my hand touched hers, she would probably have been poignantly shot, and we carried away in the screaming crowd from our coveted places waiting for the boat or the rations.
It would also have made the decision to leave our hard-won position a slightly more difficult one; but leave we did and, once we had found the optimal place in Trafalgar Square, we could just see a tiny arc of the London Eye, centrepiece of the pyrotechnic spectacular, over the top of the buildings. Great. The ‘advantage’ of our new viewpoint was that we could see several massive LED screens: this meant that, far better than fireworks, we could bid farewell to 2007 with that twat off DIY SOS. I despair of the cult of celebrity.
Midnight happened, unspectacularly as ever. We saw a few actual fireworks, but mainly implied fireworks, the presence of the 11-minute extravaganza able to be inferred by flashes in the growing clouds of smoke and the rumbling explosions echoing around the square. Wow.
Walking for an open Tube station to head home, I saw one frozen girl clad in a short, flimsy cotton dress desperately tearing at the cellophane around a packet of cigarettes with her teeth. I’m not sure if I imagined the animalistic snarling. I’m pretty sure the scathing commentary from David Attenborough was a hallucination, though.
Happy new year!
« Tuesday 25th December 2007Tuesday 1st January 2008 »
Tom F says (07:44 02/01/2008) ¶
Perhaps you should have taken your climate change banner with you. Whilst the police would be confused as to whether they should arrest you for anti-establishment slogans, your friend could have slipped through.
Network Rail deserve an award for crapness for having maintenance work on New Year's Eve.
Rebekah says (13:00 04/01/2008) ¶
Was in London too, but only ever had plans to watch on the tv. Was at Trafalgar square and Embankment during the afternoon and the constant warnings about viewing areas closing and planning transport home etc told me watching from the sofa would be better.
What I want to know is, when did they cover the Eye with all the fireworks? Cos at 3pm it was still running as normal and apart from a patch of red at one point I couldn't see anything attached to it...
laura t says (18:16 09/01/2008) ¶
sounds quite like our new year! we spent ages hanging round with tims friends then legged it to where we thought we might see some fireworks, ended up seeing the top 2 cars of the millennium eye, i cried and laughed hysterically in succession (i had had quite a bit to drink by this point) and, like 2 years ago, we saw very few fireworks. the same thing happened to my friends too,i think its quite a lost cause. id blame el and her lateness for your experience though. hehe.