If you haven’t got
any place to go, don’t go there. Tonight is New
Year’s Eve. We stay at home.
Testing the vantage point from our balcony, we sight community
fireworks at the
bay and the beach, and even farther afield. Cool evening. Clear skies.
Clouds muster
in from the east but soon vaporise overhead. Champagne. A filling chips
off –
crunch! – half an hour before midnight. (Have I bitten too
hard on the ending?)
Today, a 55-year-old Sumatran orangutan, believed to be the world's
oldest,
dies at a Miami zoo. Nonja was a “grand old dame". Fruit bats
fly by so
closely that we can almost touch their wing beats. My once-a-year
performance
(missed it again?) at midnight: didgeridoo and harmonica (Old Lang
Syne). The
didge speaks for the New Year. Blasts away the cobwebs of the past
– dear
friends all! Near by, a lone trumpeter fails to inspire his instrument,
which
pheeps pitifully (sounds as if he has a hollow chest). Here and there
in the
dark-mottled neighbourhood, crackers are lighted and a rocket or two
flighted
(despite fireworks being illegal, of course.) That’s 2007
safely wrapped up.
Widespread – and then inside to bed. But not before we are
treated to a
renegade display of fireworks from a neighbouring backyard: screamers
and
wheelers, rockets and multiple packets of bang. Then it’s all
over (the
mechanics, that is). Long live, however, the principles of free speech.
