Auld Lang Syne

“This is one of those things that you do once to say you did it, but you never do again, right?”

I’m not one to get into the jollies of New Year’s Eve. To me, it’s just another night like any other. It’s no more special than the calendar switching from Sunday to Monday or from June to July. And while I tolerate them for sports and concerts, I’m not particularly fond of crowds.

But I’m in one of those places that you just associate with New Year’s Eve, and with the city throwing its first celebration since the pandemic, I felt like I couldn’t miss out on the party in one form or fashion. My first thought was to go around the corner and watch the fireworks with a decent view down Victoria Street, but it was being used as an entrance for the folks with tickets to the official viewing areas and felt like a place to not just loiter.

So with that in mind, I started the brief 10-minute walk down to Lambeth Bridge which I had seen noted as a good place to view the fireworks if you didn’t have a ticket.

Apparently I was not the only person who noted that fact.

I arrived at the bridge around 10:45 or so, and it was already packed. There was a steady stream of folks both coming and going down the middle of the bridge, but I found an opening just at the start of it, past some trees that would have otherwise blocked the view of the London Eye from where the fireworks would originate, and decided to perch up there.

This was fine for about 30 minutes, but when an entire family of about seven or eight folks filled into the “space” next to me — there was room for maybe two of them, three tops — I started to become a little nervous about how much more the crowd might grow as midnight neared.

By 11:30, it was insane. And would only get worse. I’m honestly getting anxious just thinking about it now as I write. Eventually, the crowd was so dense that you could not move. And I mean that literally. Shuffling your feet was impossible. Forget moving your arms.

I looked to the young couple next to me — the young couple that I was pressed up against, rather — and posited my aforementioned questioned. They laughed nervously and agreed with me.

It got to the point where Big Ben couldn’t chime out those 12 tolls fast enough.

Because of course there seemed to be a path to somewhere to some folks, a gentleman and his friends approached us trying to pass a little later. After looking the opposite way to see what I might be able to do to allow them to go by, I shrugged my shoulders at their efforts.

“I think if you do a little dancer’s move, a pirouette, we might be able to get through mate.”

Ah yes, because I am certainly quite ballerina-like.

A half whirl-about was all I could muster, but it proved to be enough, and surprisingly they did indeed make it through.

My nerves were through the roof at this point, and I had to resort to playing a game on my phone to calm me down. There’s no way this is worth it, I told myself.

Finally, the year changed from 2022 to 2023, and the London Eye exploded, setting off an impressive 10-minute display.

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During a lull from our vantage point, my new friends wished me a happy new year, and I returned the greeting before the show began again in earnest. It occurred to me then that these were the first real people I’ve had a conversation with since I’ve been here. I’m quite introverted so that’s no problem to me, but I also rather enjoyed our interactions.

Have you seen the video from San Diego in 2012 when they accidentally set off all their fireworks at once? That’s what the finale looked like to me. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it was incredible.

Thankfully, the mass of humanity quite calmly then dispersed, and for the first time in nearly three quarters of an hour, I felt like I could breathe again.

Now look, I’m not here to sugarcoat anything. I want to be totally honest about my experiences. The good and the bad. So I don’t mind telling you that when I returned to the hotel, a delayed panic attack set in. It’s only the second time I’ve experienced something like that, but it made me very appreciative for the first so that I knew what was happening. I was also very appreciative for sudoku on my phone and for an old British gameshow on the telly called Bullseye, a curious game that involved at least three different dart boards with trivia questions mixed in.

Those two things helped me pass the hours until finally I was calm enough to sleep.

There were moments, yet again, where I questioned the whole sanity of this trip. I nearly pulled up Virgin Atlantic’s website to find a flight home. But that’s what this journey is all about it, isn’t it? It was never going to be easy. Nothing worth doing is, as the cliche goes. This is a whole different experience for me. There are bound to be moments of discomfort.

And so after making it through New Year’s Day, I sit here today on Monday feeling grateful. I know a situation to not put myself into again (though admittedly I would have not gone down to that bridge had I known that the crowd would be that bad). I also have recognized that I probably will like to limit the amount of time I spend in the biggest cities going forward. That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t planned this out day-by-day for the next three months. I want the flexibility to adapt to what I like and what I don’t like it.

Today has by far been the best I’ve felt so far. That panic attack was scary, but it’s in the past.

I made it.

And no, to answer my question I posed to my forced-upon-me friends, I never have to do that ever again.