Tuesday, 1 February 2022

Coronavirus streets in the year of the tiger - LIX

Decorations for the moon

Soon after work, I was out on my usual, yet irregular walking route and up a certain street into a particular neighbourhood were red lantern decorations strewn from lamppost to lamppost over the road but blown about and out of arrangement by the wind that they bunched up into groups of 5 not in the way the decorators might have intended.

Only two years before, as I walked up the street, I had a kind of foreboding that the plague that started somewhere might be brought to our doorstep, and this was well over a month before we did anything serious about it in this country. Maybe, I was letting my fears and prejudices get the better of me.

Explosive roars of the tiger

Then from just after 9:00 PM, there were a series of bangs, and this continued until well after midnight and for a while I could not determine why and I did not venture out to find out. Then I am just half a kilometre away from Manchester’s Chinatown and amongst the many things they are good at fireworks can be a beauty to watch as I was able to from my neighbour’s apartment in Amsterdam at the typical new year.

Gong hay fat choy is the Cantonese greeting I have decided to share today, translating to Happiness and Prosperity for the year of the tiger. I find it strange that this is the first time in my 8 lunar new years in Manchester that my slumber was partly distressed by the cacophony of celebratory fireworks. Then, this also heralds some sort of normalcy, not that the pandemic is over, but we are coping better with it.

Happy Chinese & Lunar New Year!

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