Typical!

So I too have a typical New Year's Eve tale to relate, illustrating only too well the problems of over determination associated with this date about which L and D have both blogged previously. Sydney, my location for New Year, is probably the New Year Eve's capital of the world. They celebrate the New Year with not one, but two firework displays! And, what's more, P, my sister's boyfriend, had bought a group of us tickets to an island in Sydney harbour, Clarke Island, from which one can look back and see the opera house, the city skyline, the harbour bridge, and the harbour filled with boats. It was ridiculously romantic - an island in the setting sun, the harbour bridge in the distance, a live jazz band, doing all the old numbers (Besame Mucho, By the Sea, The Look of Love etc), hundreds of boats with lights twinkling in the harbour, fantastic fireworks, pink fizzy wine to be slurped continiously (parents refused to let me buy pink champagne, saying it was a waste of money buying a ninety dollar champagne to be drunk out of plastic cups. Sometimes I wish my parents weren't so bloody pragmatic about absolutely everything. Still, did manage to buy four bottles of pink stuff for ninety dollars, so hurrah). All was fine til midnight, when my sister, under the influence of pink fizzy wine, and being a sensitive soul really, burst into tears. She told us about a boy she had been nursing this year who died of bowel cancer aged 23, and told us she can't not believe in life after death given her job and what she sees, and that she is very upset with Mum for wanting to give her body away to medical research when she dies! She and Mum sobbed on the ferry all the way back to Circular Quay, surrounded by drunk Aussies chanting "four-nil, four-nil" (I am so unsporty only realised this was an Ashes reference when someone started asking me if I enjoyed cricket).
Mum and Dad then left for their hotel, and we began the long walk home (no taxis to be had). A, my sister, was still a bit tired and emotional on the walk home, which was a bit horrendous (crowds of drunken youths, rubbish strewn everywhere). She and P began to bicker and were obviously building up to a big row, so I left them slightly and walked ahead. Alas, the group decided not to return to my sister's flat for sparklers, as has been planned, but to another friend's flat. I meanwhile returned to our alloted meeting point, A and P's flat. Therefore I was left, sans phone, sans key, in a road full of drunk people, for over an hour, unable to get into their flat, with awful men bellowing at me to "cheer up, it's New Year!". I was able finally to get a security guard to ring my parents' hotel room (at 3:30am!!); my Dad rang P, who ran back home, full of apologies. What a crap start to the New Year and one that felt like a terrible metonym of my life, as I begin 2007 drunk, alone, feeling lonely and upset, as streams of happy people go onto a party somewhere else.