New Year's Eve - Russian-style in the UK

New Year in Russia is a bit like Christmas in the UK. It's the day when you tidy ready for a clean New Year, exchange for presents and consume a belt-breaking quantity of food.


This year, Lily had to do a mad rush on her business on the 31st so while she busied herself with that, I busied myself with the food and the tidy up.

Before we could get to...

Champagne and the Kremlin

We had...

What better way to start off the day with New Year music, beginning with

Don't laugh too much - it's a project from a care home,
which has become an internet sensation and subject of many parodies.

and following it up with more cheesy shite?

Laugh as much as you want... this crap is "professional"

Answer... having a lie-in - it's not normal to be peeling potatoes at 9a.m. on a day off.

The morning was spent boiling potatoes and carrots and collecting everything to make 3 salads, borsch (beetroot soup) and a main course of roast chicken and potatoes.

the early stages of measuring and collecting

Just about ready to dish up

Cutting it all up and mixing it for salad and making the soup was the afternoon's work. The evening was time for cleaning up, all done to Russia's First Channel TV station, which had the traditional film (The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! - a must for Russian NYEs) followed by the gala all-singing, all-dancing celebrity show - a horrendous mix of has-beens and wannabes doing cheesy cover versions, introduced with jokes worse than from any Christmas cracker and interrupted by...

the president's New Year call for patriotism and warning that next year's going to be really shit  message of hope and call for patriotism and more patriotism, p.s. don't forget how much you love the motherland and, almost forgot, the all-important chimes of the Kremlin, to which Lily and I celebrated New Year and drank champagne (cheap cava... don't buy Tesco's own for £5 - like paint stripper with bubbles). Yes, for anyone without a grasp of timezones, three hours early. And... in true New Year style, we were now too knackered to eat and celebrate. But we did so anyway.

Let's Party Like It's 1999 89 Soviet Union

Then, to be especially multi-cultural, at midnight UK time, we refilled our glasses, listened to Ben Big, clinked glasses, made another wish, drank more fizzy pisswater and watched the fireworks. Then we opened the presents (how we'd resisted the temptation since Christmas, I'll never know) and went to bed early, like the old farts that we're not.

Happy New Year!!

So much happiness, I can't bear it.

One sip. Just one sip. That's all it takes...

Lost in a world of silly hats and candles!