UPDATE

YESSS THAT'S A CROWD RIGHT THERE.... IN CENTRAL LONDON ON NEW YEAR'S EVE.......!!! What were they there to see...?

        
These three images above was the scenery THAT crowd went to see in central London... Believe it or not it is London's most beautiful fireworks ever!!... Well it wasn't just the fireworks that agitated the crowd to show up in their thousands at that location..... but... the.... banana flavored confetti and orange flavored bubbles.. YESS!!! you heard me right...  This is the world's first multisensory fireworks display to be happening on the Thames. When I arrived on London's embankment, an estimated quarter of a million people were already there and some had been queuing for an inconceivable six hours. It was freezing. It was raining. The DJ was playing Craig David. Yet, the atmosphere was incredible. Dancing, singing - cheering when Boris Johnson appeared, hologram-style, on a huge screen across the river.

The main event, of course, was the fireworks - a show devised by Vodafone and food design geniuses Bompas & Parr. We were promised peach flavored snow, edible banana confetti and huge orange bubbles during the display - so far, so Willy Wonka. So fantastical you think to yourself, this couldn't work. I couldn't even picture it - it sounded like something out of a children's book.

But Big Ben banged in 12am and off the fireworks went - a relentless 20-minute show of whizzing fire and light that dared you not to blink. The smell of peach announced the snow and down it fell - like the real stuff except much nicer. We were doused in the scent of strawberries and huge orange bubbles floated out over the crowd - great big popping zesty spheres.I'd wager there wasn't a single person not saying "wow" every 30-45 seconds - you barely got to grips with one spectacle before another happened. It was magic - like something from Roald Dahl's imagination made real.

Then we all sang Auld Lang Syne and it was over for another year. Everyone dispersed at high speed - the tolerance for waiting replaced by the need to sort out numb feet - and that rare thing of London celebrating as a city was over again until the next big thing.

I never understood the appeal of standing in the cold for all that time just to see some fireworks. But if they do it like this again, I can say hand on heart, I can't think of a more fun and uplifting way to bring in the New Year.