Happy New year from Göteborg, Sweden!!!
And Happy New Year from Suffolk in the UK!
Happy New Year! 2009! Where is my domestic servant robot? My hovercar? Grr.
And a Happy New Year from Bingen / Germany!
I have to see a chimney sweeper today… they bring luck 
Happy New Year from Austria. Vienna is still sleeping, no servant robots or chimney sweepers to see. Too cold for them?
Well, to keep the global chain running … 新年快乐 — hsin nien kuai le — Happy New Year from South Fujian in China, where the Hokkien language comes from … and before you ask, no I don’t speak it; I only know a few words. Here in Xiamen itself, everyone but the very aged speaks Putonghua, i.e. Mandarin, albeit sometimes with a local accent. It’s enough of an intellectual challenge to be living in Mandarin, without the extra burden of the much more phonologically complex Hokkienese language.
Hokkien is actually the local pronounciation of what is ‘Fujian’ in Mandarin. Hokkienese, along with Cantonese are the two “dialects” of Chinese recognised as languages by the UN. Hokkienese is the oldest dialect, being essentially the language spoken at the imperial court in Chang’an under the Tang Dynasty of the 7th to 10th centuries AD.
Incidentally, everyone here is sending messages “Happy 牛 Year”. 牛 pronounced ‘niou’ means ox or cow, and this coming year is the Year of the Ox.
Mark
Happy New Year from Godalming. For those who may not know it, Godalming is a town in a small valley about 45 miles south-west of the centre of London. It was the first town in the UK to have electric light, the birthplace of the writer Aldous Huxley, and the place where the founder of the British colony of Georgia and most of the members of the band Genesis went to school. Oh, and where a young woman persuaded the King’s surgeon that she had given birth to a family of rabbits.
But it’s also where, perhaps unfortunately, perhaps not, chimney-sweeps, housekeeper-robots and hover-cars are thin on the ground.
H
Happy New Year from Portland, Oregon, USA! The tea and coffee house capital of the world! Oh, yeah, I hear we have good beer too but I wouldn’t know. Also lots of winter rain, which I hear dripping from my gutter on this first day of the new year! Be well, everyone, and may we all make lots of money doing what we love doing!
Alexandria
Oh God! alming … brings back 10 1/2 years of sheer misery at boarding school at the top of the North Downs nearby … Caterham! Sorry, Hugh … memories of an often beautiful part of the country that I wish I could forget!
Mark
I know what you mean, Mark.
H
Happy new year from Mexico!
Happy New Year from a surprisingly quiet Amsterdam (but ok, it’s been a while since the parties ended).
Have the best one yet 
Tanja