Fireworks have lost sparkle

It’s fireworks season again. It now starts at Halloween – any excuse to set fire to stuff, to make things go bang – before morphing into Guy Fawkes, making a spectacular leap into Diwali, and then fizzing and popping all the way through the Christmas season until New Year’s grand finale.

Even then, fireworks splutter on, so much so that one January night my mum and I were playing cards when we heard tell-tale bangs. We rolled our eyes – “Really? Still?” we grumbled – and dealt another hand.

However, the next morning we switched on the radio to discover that what we had actually heard was the sound of a man in the next street shooting his family dead.

Maybe that’s when fireworks first began to lose their sparkle.

Or maybe it was at a professional fireworks display in Johannesburg, sitting on the lawn in the dark and witnessing how, as the first fireworks whooshed into the sky, so too did all the roosting birds nearby, their panicked attempts to escape muffled by the explosions above.

Even while I oohed and aahed, I felt the beginnings of disquiet, the shadow of the birds’ terror eclipsing the chrysanthemums lighting the night.

Now I find I can no longer watch fireworks any more than I could watch bombs going off without considering the victims.

Every year during firework season and before every official display, folk are encouraged to keep their pets indoors, but no one’s warning the birds, the insects, the strays, the wild creatures we share our towns with. And nobody can deny the effect on these accidental victims.

In London, a Guy Fawkes firework display planned for a barge on the Thames has been postponed for fear of frightening Benny the beluga whale, who caused much excitement last month when he surfaced thousands of miles from his Arctic home.

Keeping Benny safe was a priority, said the local council leader, while still encouraging residents near the river to hold their own fireworks displays instead.

Yet pets have excellent hearing, even shut safely inside with the radio tuned to Classic FM. I came home from dinner the other night while bangers went off nearby, and opened the door to a frantic dog, spurting diarrhoea.

I’m not suggesting fireworks should be banned, but ... well, actually I am.