As this early post attests, I have never been a fan of celebrating New Year's Eve at home...

Since that 2010 entry, particularly memorable New Year's celebrations have come our way in Yogya, Darjeeling, KL -- and Kuching, of course, where we braved the rain last year to join the celebrations in our new home city. My conviction remains: For a good New Year's, you have to go out, and be with people.

But this year, of course, it was all different...

I'm not sure whether any municipal entertainment was provided, but we weren't risking it even if there was, so I decided we would have to bite the bullet, and celebrate at home.

To prevent any dismalness, we planned carefully. The arrival of the brand new year would be toasted with some Glenlivet, which is a rare and special treat for us here. And, as I figured it would by then have been a while since dinner, and a little supper might be required, I did some research on what foods go well with whisky (apart from oatcakes, which are off the table now, on account of their carb-heavy nature).

Some of the suggestions you can discount immediately in our context (dried fruits, apple crumble, or apple pie -- too carby; grilled steaks -- too expensive; meatloaf or seafood -- too faffy; smoked salmon -- too unobtainable).

Which left us with three possibilities: cheese, nuts, and dark chocolate (yes, really -- suggested by both my sources).

You don't want to get important things like this wrong, so the evening before the 31st, we did a taste test.


The results: Walnuts go well with wine, but didn't do much for whisky, we decided; aged Cheddar, though -- excellent; and dark chocolate -- really surprisingly good. So..., midnight supper: Sorted.

Next we needed some sort of ritual, to mark the end of the dream-destroying, family-splitting, anxiety-inducing pile of horrors that we call 2020.

I initially thought of symbolically burning something inscribed with its name. But if there's one thing that could have made last year even worse, it would have been accidentally setting fire to our apartment building.

So we decided we would drown 2020 instead.

We inscribed its foul name on a face mask, attached it to a goodly number of metal pegs, threw it into a bright pink bucket, and watched it sink.

You can see the result here, and at the end of my 1SE video for December.

I have to say it felt very satisfying.

My other New Year's Eve undertaking was to finish listening to A Christmas Carol, a version of which (really well read by Hugh Grant) had come to me free from my audiobook supplier. It's years since I've listened to any Dickens, and years since I've read this story, and it was a welcome reaquaintance. This stuff was probably designed to be read aloud -- in parlours in front of the fire to large and eager families of listeners -- and Dickens's inventive turn of phrase and descriptive ability come across all the stronger for being listened to, rather than read.

Which just left dinner to sort out. Low-carb pizza, white-style (olive oil, onion, garlic, cream cheese, and Parmesan), fancified up with walnuts and Camembert:


A movie took us nicely through to about 11 o'clock, when we adjourned to the balcony to catch up with New Year messages, and wait for midnight and the ceremonial toast.

Because we were down at the public display by the river last year, I don't know the extent to which people in our neighbourhood bought in their own fireworks that time. This year, however, I was quite moved by the number of little displays we could see all around us. From so many corners, so many gardens, big bundles of light were rising. It was as though we were ALL saying: Good riddance, 2020, we will not miss you, and we're delighted to be welcoming your successor.


We had a great walk on New Year's Day. I don't know why, but we kept finding new things. It's as though the new year had given us new eyes.



Most extraordinarily, we discovered a whole new temple hardly a stone's throw from where we live... Weird, huh?




(We also discovered some new stories about places that were very familiar to us -- but that's for another post.)

And for dinner I cooked up the purplest possible dish, which can surely not fail to be auspicious:


But this archetypally hopeful day ended on a depressing note. Sarawak registered eight new Spikes cases on that first day of 2021. I know that in some countries this number will sound infinitesimal, but here it's worryingly big... The UK, meanwhile, a country in which we're very much emotionally invested, is doing catastrophically.

And in an extraordinary tragedy, the details of which still aren't entirely clear, nine people lost their lives when their pickup truck drove off the riverside ramp that gives access to the Triso ferry -- the one we travelled on only last month -- into the Batang Lupar.

Shudder...

But yesterday I also embarked on The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, which has been on my to-read list for a year now.

It is -- well, delightful... He invites and encourages you to see the ordinary differently. I'm going to read it slowly, and try to put its inspirations into practice. We have to continue to build our defences against despair, and this is one of them.

Today, some delightful bananas, with one tiny purple flower in the middle: