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Hogmanay Snogmany
Hogmanay came and went and saw me get into trouble with a very old friend, an event which I won't go into a great deal of detail about. From a God's Eye View, it wasn't really a big deal, especially given I subsequently went on a seek and destroy mission and snogged all six of the resident Scots lasses. In the short term however, someone went spastic and someone else was quite hurt. Needless to say, I was on the first train out of Edinburgh come New Years Day. Several hours, I might add, after being treated to my very first awakening-by-strangulation and ritual dissection of my character based upon the disappearance of objects which were admittedly nowhere near my person or even vaguely within my sphere of influence at the time.
After an extremely messy Christmas day with Claudia, I was looking forward to seeing somewhere new, another (kinda) country sounded like a good change after all the time I've been spending in the wilderness of England's east. What I didn't expect was to find that the Edinburgh was devoid of Scots and full of nothing but Kiwis and South Africans. It was very odd. I heard one guy bitching that there were no kiwis, "just loads of fuckin Aucklanders." For those unaware, New Zealand and Auckland have the same relationship as England and London. Almost everyone lives there, but the rest hates us cause we don't give a rat's arse about them.
We did quite alot of exploration of the city, trying to find some of the stuff listed on the events calendar for the Hogmanay festivals, as well as obviously trying to make out own way about. As you might now expect, finding out way often became difficult due to the preponderance of our own kind. On one evening, we tried to find a jazz club which Ange and Richard had mislaid the directions for. We asked four groups of people for directions, the first three of about eight people each, all of whom turned out to be kiwis. The last group, the actual Scots, was actually only a pair. So much for seeing Scotland.
When we finally made it to the club, there were construction barriers surrounding it. Luckily they'd put up a sign saying that the planned gig was going on round the corner. We fronted up to the new venue, Cabaret Voltaire, to find that until Hogmanay it was actually going to be playing salsa. It was six quid to get in, which we swallowed, and went inside to find an absolute gem of a site. I've never seen a basement so unashamedly basementy yet so damn cool and upbeat. It wasn't dark and dingy and covered with moth-eaten tapestries and opium addicts, but cosy while still alowing plenty of dancefloor space in other areas. The DJ quickly gave way to a live six-or-eight-piece salsa band, who were excellent. I proved just how leaden my feet are, and Cath showed us all how to try and not be complete left footers. Didn't work, but great. After the band finished, the DJ came back on and played some damn nice funk, which always gets me in a good mood.
The next day, we wandered past the site of the original venue, only to realise the construction barriers were there for exactly the same reason as another building we'd seen the day before was under serious maintenance: Three weeks prior, it had caught fire and fallen down. Apparently the building was full of clubs and they're now all trying to find new homes with the insurance money.
The night of the 30th is the Night Afore celebrations, which are a still-extremely-impressive lead up to the main event. Nobody's in the city to work except a few hapless natives, both called Jimmy, so you're up for it, don't pretend you ain't. Wandering round, mocking some line-dancing action and not finding much too interesting except the purchase of ceremonial cigars for the big event the next day, Richard happily led us to the beginning point of some of the street performers. Normally a sad affair designed to relieve bored tourists of McDonalds money, I wasn't especially keen to see any of this sport, until I thumbed through the events calendar and saw some examples. Where he led us turned out to be an arse-eye view of the parade of a team of twenty-something foot high red silk giraffes piloted by two blind performers in the body of the thing. Accompanied by some minimal industrial music, the gigantic beasts with their bobbing heads were flanked and cajoled by ring masters as they blindly attempted not to go skating down the hill into Edinburgh River*. At one point we were surrounded by a half dozen of them. Noticing a small pocket of visibility into the back, I realised the hind quarters of one were distinctively feminine. Catching a backward glance, I waved and was kicked by the thirty foot mistake of evolution and theatre sports for my trouble. Remember how those boys always pulled your hair in the playground turned out to have a huge crush on you girls? Haha, yeah, got me a randy street bitch, and she be hunnerd feet tall!
Following the animals like the sheep my country is famous for, we made it to the World Music stage, where Transglobal Underground was kicking off. I lost the others at some point, which didn't really bother me, having Loved The Atmosphere all the way to the front of the stage. They played a wicked set, including good old Temple Head and a track or two they've evidently been thrashing on BBC1. After the show, they bootlegged their own CDs out the back, which I sadly missed out on.
New Years Eve itself was a great buildup, with us arriving at a bar / club at about 4 in the afternoon, already half sauced, swigging vodka, champagne and drambuie from our respective plastic, not glass, street-friendly receptacles. The place was in full swing by about 6.30, and we continued jumping round with the native South Africans and a Romanian dude till about 9.30, when we evacuated to the street and played hunt the flag so we could bait chaps in Springbok uniforms and bitch about our own kind.
Midnight was everything you want New Year's to be, but never is. It seems to me that at 90% of the parties around the world, everybody does their best to be excited about it being a new year, but nobody could really give a rat's arse. They're either hammered and about to spew, or way too sobre to enjoy themselves, or it's all too formal or the DJ just keeps playing and finally tells you it's New Year's at about 1am. Not Edinburgh, I tell you. Maybe it's the fact that hardly anybody on the streets lives there, or maybe it's the infectious way the Scots know how to throw a party. But cheering, the magnanimous snogging of strangers and everyone trying to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne (which most of us had read in their written form only a few days before for the first time) were in abundance. Really, it ruled, and I now understand why the television coverage here apparently focusses on one city every year.
On the balance, a fucking great New Year. Had its negative points, but life always does. Most New Years suck. This, most definitely, did not.
* There actually isn't an Edinburgh River, but there should be. Every time we crossed one of the bridges in the centre of the city, we excitedly looked over to find the river, only to be confronted with the central rail yard. We satisfied ourselves by pretending there was one, at night, when it was foggy.