25th anniversary of a new millennia – China has dragons!

Posted: January 1, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Brief...therefore witty. | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Happy new year!

I hope you had a good one. I didn’t really have ‘one’ – having slept through the celebrations.

I’ve had worse – such as the beginning of the year 2000, which today is the 25th anniversary.

I poked myself in the eye with a Union Jack flag, which was a crap start to the millennium.

And since then I’ve felt unappreciative of the timing of NYE.

It’s always 1000 years since 1000 years ago. Today is just 25 years since a particular 1000 years ago.

Tomorrow, a different millennia will have passed.

Whoops, there went another just then, but that might have been an adorable little century.

There are beginnings and ends across eternity, and I find focusing on only one beginning and end is just a little meagre.

All that time, all those stories, happinesses and sadnesses, era defining events redirecting courses of a trillion ships, and reliable irrelevancies, the things we’ll never know but still happened and will continue to tomorrow onwards…. saving consideration of that solely for each 31st December is a disservice to the time that has passed.

Plus, and more importantly, firework shows are dull.

It’s hard to get a good narrative going with a fireworks show.

They’re very samey – very quickly – so once you’ve seen the first minute of a fireworks show, you’ve already seen the rest. The first 60 seconds is all you need.

After that, you start to feel a bit dopey realising you’re part of a crowd all looking up at the same thing, like a cow in a herd only you’re doing something far less exciting than eating grass.

And it’s not just in-person. If watching-back the following day, you really needn’t watch a New Year’s Eve firework show specific to that year. I can watch 2008’s show and it’s genuinely much the same, as is 2010 in Paris, 2015 Sydney or 2022 NYC.

You also needn’t re-watch just on New Year’s Eve – August is doable too in case you want to insert some boredom in your summer.

I think the narrative issue is because a NYE firework show has to start with a relatively big bang and it struggles to temper its storytelling from there – unlike China’s drone-show last night.

Starting slow, building-up a story, with fewer bangs meaning you could hear the softer music, unleashing the fireworks towards a crescendo featuring a dragon which was so cool that I’m now delighted to announce it was real.

Yes it was.

They had a real dragon.

A real dragon, made in China.

Still, firework shows remain a broadly dull engagement.

I can picture someone in Ancient China living their Ancient Chinese life, attending a firework show for some national celebration, slowly realising they’re board too – partaking in an already old-age custom continued down the line to me as I watch London’s 2024 firework show above the Thames – also bored.

As well as the lack of dragons, I think the issue is the setting.

A dark night’s sky is a perfect blackly-blank canvas to hit with all those colours, but its a bit distant. If you go to a fireworks show, the fireworks aren’t actually there where you are.

A firework beneath your duvet first thing in the morning however – that’ll stay with you, and yes – so will the burns, but let’s focus on the memories.

Real dragons beneath the sheets would also result in burns, but perhaps this is something we just have to appreciate in the passage of time.

Anyway, happy new year.

But remember: millennia happen every day. As do their 25th anniversaries.

Sam