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!
