WHY I LOVE A BACK GARDEN BONFIRE NIGHT
It’s Guy Fawkes Night and NIGEL BURKE wants us all out there with sparklers to celebrate an event which has more relevance today than ever before
MY neighbours let off all of their big, conservatoryrattling and foundationfracking bombshell fireworks at the weekend, and now they’ll only have little squibs left for Bonfire Night itself.
That’s bang out of order. I’ll be having a word with them, because November 5th is our one, great British night of the year among a wretched new calendar of mercenary and made-up festivals. Halloween is just Americana now. Christmas? It’s mainly shopping. Black Friday? Just shopping cum looting.
No, on Bonfire Night we still celebrate core British values: family togetherness in appalling weather conditions, fun and friendship with a hint of anarchy and malicious glee as we burn effigies and thrill to just how near that rocket got to torching the Thompsons’ Leylandii.
Meanwhile there is the annual cats’ chorus from those who want us all to go and watch “properly organised, professional firework displays” instead of playing with fire in the back garden. Anyone who’s ever reached into the family biscuit tin of Catherine wheels – fumbling in the dark, anxious to look competent in front of the guests, while also a tiny bit afraid of the reeking cylinders within – knows the truth.
It’s like the difference between pornography and real sex. Watching skilled professionals put on a spectacular show for 20 minutes just isn’t the same as your own less perfect efforts. The excitement and intimacy just aren’t there. So let’s defend the traditional garden fireworks party, and pass on the torch to future generations.
Get set: The dogs are fed and fondled into a state of canine unconcern. Mittens are popped on tiny fists and stern briefings about sparklers are declaimed. The likely trajectory of the job-lot Chinese fireworks is mulled over. “Heaven shaking, Double Demon Sky Violator? Should be a good ’un.”
I was briefly on fire in Mallorca in 2012 when I realised two things: ritual flames really bring people together, and Britain could never stay in the EU.
It was the Fiesta of St Bartholomew in Soller, a charming little town in the north of the island. For one night in August chaps painted red and dressed as demons whirl metal baskets filled with powerful fireworks around their heads while the local children mob them and encourage them to return to Hell. There are also dragons.
THE Soller firework committee sets off arcing sheaves of flame from everywhere in the town square, making the tourists huddle beneath the trees. Then they detonate colossal bangers concealed in the branches and the tourists run shrieking to the shelter of the church portico. Then rivers of sparks gout from the firepots hidden in the masonry above their heads.
As my synthetic adventure-wear shirt melted into my skin I noticed that the Spanish locals were the ones wearing dampened cotton hoodies. They put me out by batting me with their sleeves, and there was such a friendly and convivial atmosphere all round.
The Brits were amused, having a good sense of humour and a high pain threshold, and even the Germans took it in a spirit of grim good sport, like downed fighter aces. A lot about the festival was not in the spirit of the EU Pyrotechnic Articles Directive of 2013. But the provincial Spanish don’t give a monkey’s.
By contrast, in Flemish Belgium you need a firework licence just to let off a garden rocket. I realised in a flash that Europe is eternally divided between the no-fun countries such as Germany and Belgium that take the EU and all its paper seriously, and the free-spirit countries like Spain that pay lip service to it, then do what they want. It’s ice and fire. But which is Britain – ice or fire? We’re complicated, and that’s why we could never find a place inside the derelict daydream of a single Europe.
I expect Bonfire Night to grow stronger from now on. One would have expected certain local traditions such as the humping of lighted tar barrels through the streets in Devonshire’s Ottery St Mary to fall victim to the blameand-claim culture that burgeoned in the 1990s: “Had a flaming tar-barrel accident that wasn’t your fault?”
Yet it’s still going strong, so why shouldn’t it last for centuries more? The Lewes bonfire celebrations in Sussex still bring in 80,000 spectators. Famed for burning effigies of prominent people, the town’s six bonfire societies have in recent years incinerated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – strapped to a rocket with Donald Trump – as well as Harvey Weinstein, Theresa May, David Cameron (and a pig), Jeremy Clarkson, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and the departed Col Gaddafi, and Osama bin Laden. Nothing controversial. Though it was a shame for the pig.
It takes a lot of skill to make a really good effigy to burn, so family bonfire celebrations have always been limited to burning Guy Fawkes or perhaps famous people whose faces are commercially available as masks.
Now, finally, here’s a good use for 3D printers. Take a photo of your ex, your sociopath boss or your old gym teacher, 3D-ify it on a computer and print out.
Ian Hopkins, Manchester’s police chief, called this year for a ban on the sale of fireworks to private citizens. Fat chance, copper. Better consult your cultural sensitivity checklist. Fireworks now have a place in Britain’s diverse population, and are popular at the lovely November Hindu festival of Diwali.
Many of my own Mancunian neighbours rely on buying fireworks in November to store them until the next wedding season. Coming, as they do, from parts of the world where wedding parties feature celebratory gunfire instead of confetti, fireworks are a clever compromise. Yet the most powerful reason Bonfire Night should get stronger is because it’s more relevant than it has been for centuries.
The Guy Fawkes plot is the story of a nation divided between a Protestant majority who accepted the political legitimacy of a fully independent English and Scottish crown under James I, and a Catholic minority who looked to the old European order where kings pledged their allegiance to Rome. Catholic nobles continually communicated with foreign states and eventually plotted a November 5th bombing and a coup d’état.
ASECTARIAN divide between Protestant and Catholic is all but dead in Britain. Yet there is a British minority who do not accept that their own country should have the independence from European powerstructures that it enjoyed between Henry VIII and EU accession.
From the blue flags they drape themselves in and paint themselves with, you can see they are extreme nationalists of a sort. From the hate they spew on social media, you can see that they are as convinced and as passionate as any religious zealot.
They just keep banging on about Europe. Will they conspire against British independence in the coming years? It’s a serious thing to contemplate as you gaze into the bonfire and poke about for that potato that should still be in there somewhere. “Remember, remember the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder and treason should ever be forgot.” No, indeed.