Bloody Halloween / Guy Fawkes
Oct. 31st, 2003 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesIt's bad enough that it's Halloween tonight, which has never been a British tradition but has still got large numbers of kids (some of them from my school) ringing doorbells...
It's also a week to Guy Fawkes night, November 5th, when assorted idiots will as always set fire to their homes / loved ones / selves while letting off enough fireworks to stage a small war. All this to celebrate an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the King and Parliament.
The trouble is that they seem to start setting them off earlier and earlier every year. I've been hearing occasional bangs for a week or so now, even quite early in the day, and I'm hearing them every few minutes tonight. My sister's cats are scared to go outside, and I'm worried that some trick or treater will eventually drop a firework through the letterbox.
I should explain that my hostility towards Guy Fawkes has a lot to do with events when I was 13 or so; my mother used to own a shop that sold fireworks, that year a kid threw a lighted firework over the counter and set fire to a display of several hundred others, trapping one person behind the counter (fortunately she escaped into the basement and the fire brigade got her out by smashing through a trap door used for deliveries). My mother was a much smaller and frailer woman, if she'd been there that night she would probably have been killed. The shop was destroyed, leaving my mother in debt which we never really recovered from.
Anyway, that's my rant. Have a nice Halloween and Guy Fawkes night.
It's also a week to Guy Fawkes night, November 5th, when assorted idiots will as always set fire to their homes / loved ones / selves while letting off enough fireworks to stage a small war. All this to celebrate an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the King and Parliament.
The trouble is that they seem to start setting them off earlier and earlier every year. I've been hearing occasional bangs for a week or so now, even quite early in the day, and I'm hearing them every few minutes tonight. My sister's cats are scared to go outside, and I'm worried that some trick or treater will eventually drop a firework through the letterbox.
I should explain that my hostility towards Guy Fawkes has a lot to do with events when I was 13 or so; my mother used to own a shop that sold fireworks, that year a kid threw a lighted firework over the counter and set fire to a display of several hundred others, trapping one person behind the counter (fortunately she escaped into the basement and the fire brigade got her out by smashing through a trap door used for deliveries). My mother was a much smaller and frailer woman, if she'd been there that night she would probably have been killed. The shop was destroyed, leaving my mother in debt which we never really recovered from.
Anyway, that's my rant. Have a nice Halloween and Guy Fawkes night.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-31 06:06 pm (UTC)b) I'm in an area with a lot of Indians in it, Diwali fireworks have been going off for days now, so I can't tell if Guy Fawkes is here early or whether it's a religious festival.
The difference between the US and us
1) they celebrate a successful revolution with fireworks, we celebrate the failure of a revolution
2) they use fireworks within two weeks of the longest day of the year, so it doesn't get dark until late in northern areas, at least we pick an evening just after the clocks go back but before the weather gets *too* cold!
That story of your family history is both fascinating and terrible, you have my sympathy (not that it does you a lot of good, sadly)
no subject
Date: 2003-11-01 01:49 am (UTC)An odd footnote: About 16 years later the school where I was working wanted a load of fireworks for its 200th anniversary celebration, and I was asked to pick them up. The address I was given turned out to be the 15th floor of a tower block, where the rep for a large fireworks company lived. He was keeping dozens of boxes in a flat which I am pretty sure was no more fireproof than any other flat. He also turned out to be the same rep who had sold my mother her fireworks. Couldn't even get the bugger to give me a trade discount.