New Year’s Eve 2021: celebrations around the world amid concern over Covid – live updates

• 1.13pm GMT13:13 Sydney enters new year with fireworks over Sydney harbour
• 11.17am GMT11:17 Light show marks arrival of 2022 in New Zealand

Alfie Packham

Readers have been getting in touch to tell us how they’re celebrating the New Year.

In Australia, Huw Neill, 53, who moved to Melbourne from London in June 2020, has spent his evening watching the fireworks with his family in Coogee Beach, a short distance south of Sydney city centre. The event started early to avoid clashing with the “big one’’ at midnight in Sydney Harbour Bridge.

“We booked our holiday here a couple of months back, before Omicron was a thing,” said Neill. “We’ve not been out of Victoria since we arrived last year, so we’re just in time for the Omicron explosion. We entered New South Wales with a certain amount of trepidation, but the event on the beach was fairly well socially distanced, so it was good fun.”

Neill, who works in sales for a small publishing company, says he is “trying to be optimistic” about the coming year. “We’ll have to see what happens with Omicron, but this time last year we were saying 2021 would be better than 2020, and that worked out for us. I think you have to enter every year thinking the same thing.”

If you would like to share your own New Year’s Eve plans, you can get in touch here.

Now, I’m not saying that I am a new year curmudgeon, but you may have noticed that I’m spending my New Year’s Eve writing our live blog, and be able to draw your own conclusions about my party plans. Michael Segalov has absolutely put his heart on his sleeve for us today though, writing about how he is embracing staying in:

It was never my intention to hide in the toilet. There was lots going on outside: highbrow small talk and top-tier networking; free drinks, air kisses, and cold canapés. The gallery was filled, I’d been assured, with fashion figures and media leaders. I was lucky to have been invited to this salon, one of the hosts had informed me, generously. Exactly what a “salon” is, I’m still unsure.

Deep down, I just didn’t want to be there. Only 90 minutes previously I’d been watching Gogglebox and scoffing Pringles in bed. But I went along out of some sense of duty. Perhaps a desire to broaden my horizons, or a compulsion to step outside my comfort zone, where I had become too safe and snug. Now here I was, sitting in a locked cubicle counting down the minutes before I could leave without seeming rude.

This year, I’m refusing to be sucked in again – I’m determined to embrace saying yes to saying no to things I simply don’t want to do.

Read more here: Michael Segalov – Say no to Fomo: how I embraced staying in

Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra are now very firmly into 2022 – so I’d like to take a moment to wish a happy New Year to all our Australian readers, and indeed my colleagues in our offices there. Canberra, as ever, keen to let people know that Sydney doesn’t have a monopoly on fireworks in Australia.

Rather excitingly for time nerds, Australia enjoys one of those time zones that is offset by thirty minutes, rather than an hour, which means Adelaide is about to celebrate the new year.

However, they made a head start to it, with a firework display already over Adelaide Oval after the Men’s Big Bash League match between the Adelaide Strikers and the Sydney Thunder. We’ll draw a discreet veil over the fact that the Strikers just lost their sixth match in the last seven.

Is any New Year’s Eve celebration complete without a shot of fireworks over Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge? Absolutely not.

Don’t forget that we are very keen to hear how you are celebrating – or indeed have celebrated – the start of 2022 where you live. Here’s how to get in touch with our community team: Tell us – what are your plans for New Year’s Eve?

Another chunk of the planet has just gone past midnight and into 2022. Vladivostok isn’t quite far east enough in Russia to have done so yet – it is still just gone 11pm there – but it looks like the party is in full swing in in Revolution Fighters Square.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

There’s a treat in store for traditionalists in London today, as Maya Wolfe-Robinson reports:

London’s public fireworks display may be cancelled, but Westminster’s new year revellers will be treated to Big Ben’s newly painted dials as the clock bongs 12 times to mark the end of 2021.

The 96-metre clock tower above the Houses of Parliament, which houses the Great Bell known as Big Ben, has been mostly hidden from view since a £79.7m conservation projection began four years ago.

For the first time since 2017, the clock face will be revealed to show the conservation work that has taken place, including the restoration of the original colour scheme.

Using historic paint analysis and Charles Barry’s original watercolour designs, conservationists have reinstated a Prussian blue and gold colour scheme for the dials and clock hands. They believe the black paint of the clock dials and stonework that many associate with the national symbol was chosen in the 1930s to mask the effects of pollution.

The team hope that New Year’s Eve will be the last time Big Ben is struck using a temporary striking mechanism, which has powered the hammer used to strike the bell during the restoration period to mark events such as Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.

Read more of Maya Wolfe-Robinson’s report here: Restored Big Ben to bong again at midnight to bring in new year

Hello, it is Martin Belam here taking over the blog for a while. It is the second consecutive new year that the world will be celebrating under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic – and while we will try and keep things light-hearted and celebratory here, there’s going to be a lot of Covid symbolism in some of the pictures coming through. This scene is from Ahmedabad in India.

Nicola Davis

As new year approaches, crowds around the world may be expecting whizzes and bangs to light up the sky. But the appeal of fireworks could fizzle out with the growing use of drones for light shows.

One notable example was the opening ceremony of this year’s Tokyo Olympics, while the Over the Top NYE event at Reunion Tower in Dallas is among those planning to combine fireworks and drones to welcome 2022.

They are also being embraced at a local level: more than 1,000 people watched a drone display at Mercia Marina in Derbyshire to celebrate Bonfire Night this year.

The latest countries to pass into next year are another series of islands in the Pacific including Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati, as well as the eastern most town in Russia, Anadyr.

Over in the state of Western Australia, the local daily newspaper The West Australian, has captured the feelings of many with its New Year’s Day edition frontpage headline. “Here’s to 2022 being better (Hey, it can’t get much worse!)“

Over in Sydney, they enjoy the fireworks so much that they hold two displays. The city in Australia is not due to see in the New Year for a couple of hours yet – but holds two sets of shows. The first one was let off at 9pm local time, with another due later as the clock strikes midnight.

They took place in the city’s famous harbour, against the backdrop of the Opera House.

New Zealand celebrated the first moments of the new year with a light show on the Harbour Bridge in Auckland.

Crowds were able to gather for the first time since August after the city on the country’s north island was moved from red to orange in its Covid traffic light system.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

It’s certainly a different one as the planet celebrates the second New Year’s Eve during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pacific islands including Samoa, Kiribati and Christmas Island have already been among the first to mark the arrival of 2022.

It’s been a year that has seen the roll-out of vaccines, the Capitol attacks, the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, Derek Chauvin was jailed for murdering George Floyd , the latest James Bond finally hit cinema screens and Britney Spears was freed from her conservatorship.

It was a year to remember in sport, as 18-year-old Emma Raducanu won the US Open, England reached the final of a major tournament for the first time since 1966 and the delayed Tokyo Olympics took place.

Many celebrations in major cities across the globe have been cancelled because of the threat of rising Covid cases amid the Omicron variant. So as we splutter rather than sashay into the New Year, tell us how you’re seeing in the New Year.