Home is where the heart is, as we shut out the dark this New Year The impatient could not resist setting off a few rockets as darkness fell. Each pop in the sky felt like a gesture of bloody-minded defiance A woman takes a selfie during New Year celebrations in Melbourne, Australia Credit: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images On New Year’s Eve 1899, as “spectre-grey frost” turned all around him to desolation and confined humanity to the sanctuary of indoors, the writer Thomas Hardy famously found consolation in the joyful song of a thrush “frail, gaunt and small”. On Thursday night, we had to make do with drones. How strange – how fitting that in this year of working from home and of the scientists’ accelerated battle against the oldest weapon in nature’s armoury, our celebrations should take synthetic, robotic form, our comfort exchanging feathers, flesh and blood, the press of bodies lining the Thames, for plastic and the whir of tiny electric motors – time-delayed and remote-controlled.