Many of you reading this will already have made the most important decision of
2007. No, I don’t mean deciding between a) bloody just giving up, and
throwing yourself down a well, or b) having another small gin, and carrying
on, like a brave little soldier. I mean Bonfire Night! Tonight! Wahey!
In many ways, your attitude towards Bonfire Night celebrations defines who you
are, and where you’re at, in any particular year. It’s a bit like your hair,
or your shoes. Are you going to have a bonfire in the back garden? Or are
you going to go to an organised event? What does that say about you? What
are the pros and cons of either? Let’s find out!
Bonfire in your back garden
There are only two reasons why you do Bonfire Night in your back garden. The
first is that you prefer – just as you possibly do with your healthcare, and
on matters of transport – to eschew public offerings, and make private
provision for yourself. You reckon on doing a better job than those
jobsworths at the council will – that your own do will be more convenient,
and better acknowledge your festive banging and flashing needs.
Despite the fact that you’ll easily spend more than £100 on fireworks, and buy
top-quality sausages, your children will inevitably, I’m afraid to say, be
disappointed with the affair. They will beg you to take them to the “proper
do”, where all their friends are going, and which has fireworks that do a
bit more than hit the top of the lilac tree, scream for a while, like a
demented gay fireball, then die.
Next year, you will go to a “do”, but you’ll have problems parking the 4x4,
and so will vow to do it at home the following year. At this point, of
course, the kids will beg you to take them to a “do” the following year –
and so on it goes, in an unhappy Bonfire Night cycle, until you die.
The second reason for having a bonfire in your garden is pretty much the
opposite of the first. You are staying at home because you can’t afford to
take the whole family to an organised event, what with the
tickets-are-£7.50-each palaver this, and the parking that, and the hotdogs
the other. With eight children and scarcely two pieces of cheese to rub
together, the Home Bonfire was the Bonfire Night option of my childhood.
And, to be frank, the Bonfire Nights of my childhood were not terribly
effective affairs. This is mainly because the mid-Eighties marked the start
of the true Age of Plastic. Where once England had been full of flammable
things – orange crates; logs; all of old London Town – in the Eighties
everything started being made of synthetics.
Many may decry falling educational standards in this country but, looking
back, there can be no doubt that the Eighties was a more retarded age.
Caught between the Age of Wood and the Age of Polystyrene, the people of
England still tried to construct bonfires, but had no clue what would burn
and what wouldn’t. It was a time of amazing rococo experimentation with
relative flammability. You would see bonfires consisting of plastic Sunblest
crates, tin cans, old batteries, Betamax videos and a pair of wet tracksuit
bottoms. People would be trying to set fire to mildew and dog hair and
earth. This is, perhaps, why people never bothered looking for hedgehogs
hibernating in bonfires back in the Eighties. We needed all the flammable
organic matter we could get.
The home bonfire option suffers similar problems, in terms of available
materials, when it comes to the Guy. While the villagers of Lewes might,
every year, construct a gigantic effigy for their public conflagration, the
private bonfirer is, by necessity, hamstrung by a relative lack of
materials. One year, unable to find within our family a spare jumper or a
shirt to stuff and burn, we were left with no option but to stuff a pair of
trousers, then tape a mask to the crotch. (In subsequent years, as Simon
Cowell rose to fame, I couldn’t help but notice a haunting echo of that
torso-less manikin sitting on a pile of flaming rubbish.)
Of course, there are advantages to the home bonfire. The main one is that you
can have the bonfire whenever you wish, to fit in with your schedule. Well
do I remember the year that my father – keen that we not miss the beginning
of The Two Ronnies at 8pm – threw a can of petrol on to the bonfire to
“hurry it up a bit” and set fire to next door’s shed. It’s only now, as I
type this, that I recall that he spent three years working as a fireman and,
perhaps, should have known better.
The organised do
While, on nearly every level, this is superior to anything you could ever do
at home – the sky flowering and flaming with a thousand tonnes of dynamite,
a community united in awe, three glow sticks for £1 – there is one
considerable problem with the organised do in the park: the music. Oh dear,
the music. Perhaps I have an overdeveloped sense of embarrassment, but I
find a PA booming out The Ride of the Valkyriesas 15 starbursts go off
quite mortifying. It’s a bit . . . overdramatic, isn’t it? Like men who
shout “I’m really GIVING it to you” while having sex. At either point, you
don’t really need to ramp the experience up much. You are overegging the
exciting-times pudding. You need to calm down a bit, to be honest.
Besides, for those brought up on classic Warner Bros cartoons, they cannot
hear The Ride of the Valkyries without accompanying it with the lyrics:
“I’m going to kill the wabbit/ Kill the wabbit/ Kill the wabbit!” in their
heads, in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
The gloves are off in the tea-towel debate
Last week’s column – a treatise on the EVIL MENACE that is the oven glove –
has provoked an unprecedented inbox. Thirty-one readers wrote in to defend
the honour of the kitchen mitten, disputing my righteous insistence that we
should simply use a folded-up tea-towel, instead – surely the choice of the
late, great Sir Winston Churchill, were his roast about to char. This
pro-oven glove counter-attack included a missive from the otherwise
beautiful and respected broadcaster Stuart Maconie, who proudly announced
that he had something “one better” than an oven glove: the “grabber"
(from Lakeland, of course). I think he understands why I had to reply with
the words and phrases that I did.
Evelyne Swaine says, defiantly, “I’d like to see you tackle an Aga without
oven gloves”, little knowing that one of those thick sweat towels that
people steal from gyms will serve admirably. Margaret Lipsley tries to
defend her glove, yet admits that it’s greasy, “covered in burn marks and
generally disgusting, and left hanging next to the oven”. Exactly! Should
the Plague strike Britain again, it will start in the warm, unwashed
environs of the oven glove. It’s practically a hotbed of terrorism.
Alan Slaymark, meanwhile, recounts how, only yesterday, he was burnt while
using a tea-towel to manoeuvre a hot apple strudel – then reveals that said
tea-towel was WET. WET? Tsk. Slaymark, if you want to stay in my mighty
Tea-Towel Army, you’re going to have to change your MO PDQ.
Heather headlines
For those who missed Heather Mills’s outburst on GMTV, YouTube offers a chance
to catch TV history in the making. But if you can’t be bothered, the
poster’s wry eye for a succinct summation of the highlights provides a swift
crash-course: “I Live in a Prison”; “Worse than a Murderer or a Paedophile”;
“Death Threats & I Wanted to Die”; and “I Didn’t Kill My
Neighbour’s Dog.”
Dear Caitlin, I've never written a fan mail before (or email for that matter). But you are right up there with Emma Thompson, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman and Kelly Jones' voice.
Here's to you.
Paul Hannibal
paul, blackpool, england
Bonfires
I have a bonfirfire for a completely different reason (to your two) - it's the only day of the year when I can get rid of 12-months axccumulated rubbish without annoying the neighbours (actually they are still unhappy but do'nt actually like to complain when the children are enjoying it so much). Rubbish gone; wonderful
paul, Norwich,