It’s bang out of order
Fireworks shortage offers a chance to reset November 5 as a one-night event, not a weeks-long bombardment
AMID all the stories of shortages of toys this Christmas, food stuffs running low, too few lorry drivers and a paucity of fruit pickers – all thanks to Covid and to Brexit – I bring some good news.
There may not be enough fireworks to go round this year.
You see? Even a pandemic has an up-side. Don’t get me wrong, I like a sparkly Catherine wheel as much as the next woman. I love the oohs and ahhhs of the kids as the night sky explodes into a million coloured light fragments.
And frankly if I can’t write my name in the air with a sparkler on November 5 then my Bonfire Night is ruined.
But that’s my point. Fireworks should be reserved for one night only – perhaps a few days either side if it doesn’t fall on a weekend. I might even stretch to folk letting a few go at midnight on New Year’s Eve but only because we’ve all had such a rotten time of it of late.
That’s not enough for some. Now it’s become the norm for bangers and rockets to be firing off from October through to mid January.
Yet we light them to remember a specific event on a specific day – the foiling of the plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
At this juncture I should mention that thanks to some excellent family history work by my motherin-law we’ve discovered there is a vague chance my husband is related to Mr Fawkes, so I have some skin in the game here.
Anyway, my point is we use fireworks and gunpowder to mark a culturally significant moment in our historical calendar, we’ve been doing it since the 17th century yet somehow that meaning has been diluted.
This has two effects.
First, given fireworks seem bigger and louder than ever – it’s like being beneath the big guns on a battlefield round our way – it means weeks and weeks of terrified animals and old folk and people jumping out of their skin while trying to watch Corrie.
Second, it spells a further blurring of the lines of what we used to fondly know as seasons.
Once, there was a rhythm to the year.
Strawberries in June, and then pumpkins in October, tinsel in the shops at the end of November. Now it all blurs into one as Christmas starts in September, Halloween at the end of August and Easter just after the selection boxes have been cleared from shop shelves.
I guess it’s part of this headlong race we’re all caught up in – with retailers firing the starting gun – to be constantly looking at the horizon at what’s coming next rather than enjoy being where we are right now.
But all that does, apart from fill the coffers of the stores, is make us all wonder where the time went. After the last 18 months we’ve all endured, maybe it’s time to press reset. And when the fireworks do explode on November 5, maybe we’ll remember, remember why.