5th November is England’s only real historical festival. Unlike most countries we don’t seem to have anything much that is just ours, full of archaic tradition that hasn’t just become a way for corporations to sell us more stuff. Bonfire Night is the closest we come, and done right it’s my favourite night of the year.
Tonight, we should all be out on the streets with bangers, letting rockets off in crowded areas and nearly setting fire to ourselves with sparklers. The council should have spent months building a mountain of old pallets, hay, cardboard and lots and lots of tyres to create a monstrous, acrid inferno that boils puddles at 10 paces.
I LOVE bonfire night. I think it should be a national holiday. I have perfect childhood memories of cold nights, thick socks under wellies and freezing faces peering out from under bobble hats*.
The thing is, we don’t seem to do it properly anymore. I’m excluding the Lewes celebrations here, since they do it right. But the town is too small for the whole of Sussex to join them – let’s face it, every town should be doing something along those lines. There should be no reason why the people of Brighton have to crowd into Lewes’s narrow streets every year.
The sky should be alive with fireworks. The smell of wood fires should drift across the breeze to all corners of the country. A car journey should pass countless houses all holding their own mini displays with fires in little braziers or piles of wood and leaves burning slightly out of control, dangerously close to the trees and the conservatory. From any vantage point, you should see rockets flashing in all directions. The telly should be full of scary Firework Code safety messages and Blue Peter should feature maimed children who swallowed roman candles last year.
What does Brighton do? Bugger all. There is an (I’m told excellent) firework display at the cricket ground but these things really should not be happening behind a pay barrier, inside an arena. They should be open, public, municipal events on the beach or at Preston Park, with a fire and treacle toffee. I’m sorry, but paying £10 for corporate explosions doesn’t cut it for me. They don’t even have a fire. There’s a clue in the name, Brighton – bonFIRE night.
We’ve got another year to think this through and do it properly next time.
* – autumn was colder back then. And it was the north.
