I've neglected this blog in the last
year.
The post count says sixty-five but
that's a bit of a lie. It's as misleading as the medical claims on a
TV advert for toothpaste. This blog has been clinically proven to
have more than five posts a month on average. Except that it hasn't,
has it? Of those sixty-five posts at least twenty-five of them were
reposted from things I'd put on Facebook so that the actual count for
the year is no more than forty. Probably rather fewer.
So for a while I shall return to
posting a few things here.
There may still be reposting going on
but I'll try to, as they say in television circles, “deliver new
content”.
So let's begin with last night's New
Year celebration at The Lounge, an ex-pats bar in Yangshuo. I go
there a lot but usually there are no more than about ten people in –
sometimes just me and Adam, and he owns it! Last night was different
- it was packed. There's a band that plays every week at another bar
in town and they had set up their equipment in the lobby of the
adjoining hotel (which, bizarrely, seems to only have guests about
once a year). There were cheap drinks and free food. There were
fireworks. And there was possibly the most surreal spectacle that I
have ever witnessed outside a David Lynch movie.
At one point in the evening there was
something Adam described to me as a silent disco. Sets of cordless
headphones were handed out to people who could put them on and then
choose from one of two different playlists being piped into them. The
music wasn't audible to those of us without them.
These headphone-wearing customers
listened to the music and danced to it while the room itself was
filled with an eerie silence broken only by the shuffling of their
feet on the tiled floor. To make it even more bizarre all the
headphones came equipped with flashing red and blue lights and the
room lighting was subdued to the point where tripping over the
furniture became a major hazard.
It all went on for about twenty minutes
and the sight of twenty or so people dancing to music that only they
could hear was unbelievably weird. It looked like a cross between
scenes from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and an early Doctor Who
episode where the Cybermen were busy taking over people's brains with
silver headsets.
Anyway, it was a passably jolly evening
over all. I've had far worse New Year's Eves in the past. Hopefully
it will bode well for the forthcoming year.
