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

Here are some more of the non-firework images that have caught my eye as the world enters 2022. People have been enjoying a lot of activities as the sun sets for the last time on 2021, including taking a camel for a stroll.

This is a fisheye lens view of people waiting for fireworks to start under the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in the UAE.

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has been conducting a New Year’s Eve service.

Large-scale New Year celebrations have been cancelled in Germany and recently installed Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has advised Germans to spend the holiday period “very cautiously” and celebrate only in very small groups.

Australia may have scaled back official celebrations, but there are still plenty of people out on the streets enjoying the firework displays and party atmosphere.

2022 has begun in South Korea, and here’s a picture of Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and others hitting a huge bell to welcome in the new year, which has just been broadcast.

One catch, though. The photograph is from 29 December, when they were pre-recording the new year celebrations. It is the second year in a row that Seoul’s annual New Year’s Eve bell-ringing ceremony has been cancelled due to the pandemic.

How does celebrating New Year’s Eve in 2021/22 feel in one photo? This is a contender. A dog with a Happy New Year collar and wearing 2022 glasses, sat right next to a “Do Not Enter. Keep Out” sign.

The dog is called Teddy and he is 12 years old, and I should imagine he is a very good boy indeed.

A lot of us will set new year’s resolutions around our alcohol intake in the coming hours, and Fiona Beckett has her view for us today on what to do about drinking in 2022. Her suggestion for wine – drink less, but drink better. She writes:

I’m not advocating increasing your booze budget, rather reallocating it. Add up what you spend on alcohol in the average week (average perhaps not being the run-up to Christmas), and spend it on something better – you could pick up a more than decent bottle for the cost of a couple of cocktails, for example. Plus, you should still be able to take advantage of Christmas offers this weekend, as well as bin-end and sale reductions during the coming month.

Drinking better doesn’t just mean spending more, however; it also means drinking with a spirit of adventure. Explore a new country, wine region or grape variety each month. Overcome your prejudices. You could also think of buying your wine in alternative formats – half-bottles, say, or even cans.

I’m very much a two-pints-of-lager-and-a-packet-of-crisps man myself, but you can read Fiona’s suggestions here: New Year wines – drink less, drink better

The next tranche of countries that will be entering 2022 on the hour will include Japan.

Yesterday the honour of ringing the bell to close trading on the Tokyo stock market for the year fell to actor Ryo Yoshizawa.

Today, Shintoist priests have been arriving to hold a ritual in preparation for the New Year at the Meiji Shrine in the city.

Comiket is also going on in Tokyo at the moment. Said to be the largest fan convention based around comics in the world, it hasn’t been held since December 2019 because of a combination of the coronavirus pandemic and wanting to avoid clashing with the Tokyo Olympics in the summer.

This photograph shows someone there who is cosplaying as a “remote worker”. I can neither confirm or deny that I wear a similar outfit while live blogging for the Guardian.

Time zones staggered every thirty minutes are the gift that keep giving on New Year’s Eve. It is about to strike midnight in Darwin and Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. But not every New Year’s Eve picture is a happy one. Activists have chosen today to demonstrate and highlight the plight of youth detainees who will see in the new year in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

Speaking of Russia, it celebrates New Year’s Eve over 11 time zones, and that means that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already given his televised midnight message in the Kamchatka peninsula.

Agence France-Presse report that he offered support to all those in Russia who had suffered through the coronavirus pandemic, saying “The insidious disease has claimed tens of thousands of lives. I want to express my sincere support to everyone who has lost relatives, loved-ones, friends.”

He also had a strong message that will be heard beyond Russia’s borders, telling his nation that “We firmly and consistently defended our national interests, the security of the country, and citizens.”

You might be forgiven for thinking that New Year’s Eve is all about fireworks from the photographs that get picked by the media, but here are some of my favourite pictures of the day so far that don’t feature fireworks.

This is Ethiopia’s Belay Bezabh winning the Sao Silvestre international race in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Run over 15 kilometres, the race is held annually on New Year’s Eve, but was suspended in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was on again this year, but closed to the public this year as a safety precaution, and all the runners had to be fully vaccinated against Covid.

Somewhat braver than me, members of the She Swims Falmouth have had a bracing morning New Year’s Eve swim at Gyllyngvase Beach, Cornwall.

These people gathered in Quetta, Pakistan, to watch the sun set for the last time in 2021.

Here are people gathered in Red Square in Moscow. It will be shut later from 5pm local time until 7am the next day as part of Russia’s Covid curfew restrictions.

OK, I still couldn’t resist one fireworks photograph.

Queensland in Australia is about to greet 2022, as are Papua New Guinea and Guam. Emily Woods has a round-up here of how Australia has been celebrating cautiously this year:

Australia has welcomed in the new year more cautiously than usual, with far fewer people attending firework displays and other events.

But after a tumultuous 2021 the prime minister, Scott Morrison, said Australians had much to be thankful for. “Despite the pandemic, despite the floods, the fires, continuing drought in some areas, the cyclones, the lockdowns, even mice plagues, Australia is stronger today than we were a year ago. And we’re safer,” he said in a New Year’s Eve message.

Although thousands of people flocked to vantage points beside Sydney Harbour to watch the city’s internationally renowned fireworks, only 17,000 tickets went on sale. Masks were encouraged and unvaccinated people were asked to stay home.

More than a million revellers have visited the city for the displays in previous years. But this year’s displays did not lacked scale, with six tonnes of fireworks launched across two displays at 9pm and midnight.

Read more of Emily Woods’ report here: Australia cautiously rings in 2022 with firework displays but smaller crowds

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?