Bonfire Night
It’s not very often I get to sing the praises of my estate. It’s a proper London estate, replete with all the things you’d expect from the above – noisy neighbours, bored kids, overturned bins etc. – but don’t get me wrong, as council estates go, it’s a very nice one and I like it a lot.
Especially tonight.
Bonfire night is not, contrary to some myths, a celebration of the time that a bunch of Catholic conspirators failed to blow up James I and the Houses of Parliament, before being tortured horribly to death for their endeavours. Bonfire night is a celebration of a bunch of people here and now, blowing stuff up, making very pretty pictures in the sky, waving around sparklers, eating candy floss, going to fairs, getting cold and rained on, and heading off for a pint afterwards. Ask most people today what they think of blowing up the houses of parliament, and you’re unlikely to get a rant about Protestant patriotism. I love fireworks – I love looking at them, and I love looking at the people looking at them. Only the soul dead and the pick pockets can go to a fireworks display with anything other than a goofy grin attached to their faces after the initial shock of the first bang is over. As a kid I used to go to Highbury Fields and watch the fireworks, complete with full orchestral accompaniment; now that recession is on us, I have to go a little further afield to get my bonfire night experience, but will be doing so this weekend or else.
Tonight, however, my estate put on a little display of its own. Quite where the gentlemen in the central courtyard got their hands on such high powered explosives, I do not know. But grab them they did and after the first ear-shattering bangs had gone off, I, along with most of the rest of the flats around me, turned out onto balconies and stairwells to see what was going on. There wasn’t any system to it, any organisation, just a bunch of blokes setting off increasingly larger fireworks, but as they did, more and more turned out to see, and by the final whoosh-scream-boom! there was an appreciative crowd of cheerers. The police called by in a van, clearly on the prowl for trouble tonight, and seeing that all that was really happening was a bunch of local strangers cheering wildly, waved and moved on by. It’s hard to feel bad around a decent firework display, it seems to be one of those events where the same goggling grin that infects the face of infants comes to the faces of everyone else, and quite without realising you’re doing it, ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaahs’ break out spontaneously from even the most constipated of viewers.
It’s not very often I get to say I’m part of a local, united community. But – and I love writing this – through the power of high explosives, I am tonight.
