Happy New Years!!

We couldn't let a New Years in a new city go by without doing something other than sitting in a house and having a few shandies. So at 11pm we jumped on a tube and made our way, along with the other half of London, down towards Waterloo, to get a front row seat for the celebrations. After a bit of jostling we were in a good position to see Big Ben and the London Eye. The countdown was on and Big Ben resonated his peal into the New Year. The London Eye hosted some fireworks before everything once again fell silent and the masses streamed back underground into the tube.

Some of you readers may have noticed that the New Year lasted a bit longer this year, and no it wasn't just the amount of alcohol you ingested. 2006 marked the addition of a leap second to the world's atomic clocks. If you weren't so busy looking at the fireworks, you may have noticed that your digital watches showed 23:59:60 before ticking over to 0:00:00. Ok, so maybe you didn't really miss that but you can read about some clocks that did at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second.

Looks like we're gonna need a montage...

The many colours of the London Eye

during the countdown to New Year's

Happy New Year! The south bank and

London Eye explode with fireworks after

Big Ben announces the twelfth stroke of the New Year

There was a bit of drizzle, but

that didn't worry us too much

More fiery works...

They did go for quite a while...

And again...

By the time the grand finale of

the fireworks came around, there

was plenty of smoke