Guy Fawkes Night
5 11 2007
It’s Guy Fawkes Night and that means it’s one of those few times when we burn a little cash just for the fun of it. A £10 box of quiet fireworks - with livestock we don’t have rockets, bombs or anything that shrieks and squeals - goes a long way in entertaining a couple of small boys - and their parents!
The boys were very chuffed with our little display in the front garden, especially with the fountains that produce a huge amount of smoke and a very bright flame.
The stars were popular, too.
Sparklers? Where’s mine, then? The Other Half simply cannot resist a sparkler.
And to finish with, a display of sparkler writing!
I LOVE sparklers! Looks like fun.
I’m with the OH and Susie - I love sparklers and always insist that I have one too. I’m sure Susie’s girls will remember me playing with them last New Year’s Eve! Fabulous sparkler writing, boys.
We had an interesting discussion on sparkler related semantics at our lane’s bonfire. My Aberdeen born neighbours call them starry lighters, I (Lancashire) call them sparklers, as do the neighbours originally from Banffshire and Shetland. The Afrikaans speaking South Africans also used sparkler, but I don’t know if that’s a straight translation.
I had no idea that a sparkler could be called anything else…
Quiet fireworks ? What bliss!
My dog asks if she can come to live with you next November, please?
Let’s hope all the bangers were let off by last night….. the three night of Guy Fawkes this year (Sat/Sun/Mon) have left the dog’s nerves in tatters
I know it is a lot of fun for the kids, but when I watched the horizon last night and saw just how much money had been spent on fireworks, I shuddered a little.
I think you got it about right…. a few quid will create just as lasting impression on your two lads as some of the £100 and £200 displays put out from people’s gardens around here.
I don’t usually have much time for supermarkets, other than as a necessity when there are no other shops to be found, but I did appreciate Tesco providing descriptions of their fireworks by noise level.
We nearly didn’t buy any fireworks at all, but being able to choose quiet ones meant we could have a little fun in the front garden without bothering the animals. (The house, steading, trees and quite a bit of land separete the garden from most of the livestock, while the two sows that are inside at the moment were behind closed doors on the other side of the house.)
I don’t think there should be a ban on fireworks, but I think the larger ones and the noisiest ones should not be publicly available. Ours were excellent for a garden, would have been fine in an urban environment and were great fun for the boys.
So why spend a fortune blowing the neighbourhood up?
We bought the quiet ones from Tesco last year and they certainly lived up to their name and were not that loud, even Lassie did not go the usual ballistic and there was not a signal woof from her
This year we didn’t have any fireworks as our new cat is afraid of rustling leaves let alone a slight whizz or bang that there might have been….next year maybe!
A couple of years back, when I was living in that wonder street, one of the ‘neighbours’ got the biggest and loudest display quality fireworks they could find..let them off in their post card size garden. I ended up sedating the dog, and allowing my car alarm to go off when the bangs set it off!
Far too loud and in appropriate in a residential area, they had my double glazed window panes rattling and I was concerned with them breaking. It was what I would imagine a war zone is like, and indeed my mother likened it to the bombs dropping in WWII
I’ve always loved firework night…as a kid it was something I joyfully anticipated until the night of the fire, when we had a mixed display with lots of pretties and a few good bangs. It was a lot of fun…
However, down on our part of the south coast, we’ve just had nearly two weeks of morons competing with each other to produce the biggest best and loudest bangs…some nights there have been half-hour spells where the detonations have been every fifteen seconds or so for up to half an hour… where do they get the money from and why oh why can’t they save it until bonfire night or at least the nearest weekend?
We have cats, dogs and ducks and the poor animals have been petrified…one particularly bad night I had to recover the ducks from behind the compost heap, where they’d crept off in terror…we even had them in the kitchen for a short spell (withattendant mess) one night to try to calm them down…
I think the time is coming when some sort of control is imposed…in many ways I shall be sorry, (rose tinted images of years gone by, and visions of family nights like yours), but these idiots are bringing this about - as I write this at 0120 a loud detonation has just disturbed the neighbourhood…
I suspect the Government will simply ban fireworks at some points. The people in power, of all shades, like bans far too much.
All that’s needed is a crackdown on the sales of display and industrial fireworks, which are far too big for 95 per cent of gardens anyway. The public should only be able to buy genuine garden fireworks, not the sort of thing that should be left to professionals (and even they get it wrong occasionally).
After that, swingeing fines for people who act like idiots with fireworks.
It is a simple matter to make laws, but it is the application of them that is the problem.
e.g. there is a law against using a mobile phone whilst driving…. on any day, I see dozens of people driving carelessly whilst telephoning. Funny that the police don’t see them!…. on occasions they are eating their lunch at the wheel at the same time.
There is a law about cars parking on pavements… but around here, pavements get completely blocked by parked cars, putting disabled people and Mums with prams at risk when they have to walk out onto the road to get past.
And, like Cogidubnus, I wonder whence the firework brigade get the money to burn.
I love fireworks, but I am afraid I must disagree with you on the public availability of them. I am happy enough for my kids to have sparklers at the house, but if they want something livelier, we go to a display. Apart from the disgusting amount of money that goes up in smoke, we are surrounded by livestock, with no properties between us and their pastures. Well, I say ’surrounded’ - the east field is tatties
Anyway, I think that ‘proper’ fireworks should be displayed in organised events, by properly safety conscious organisers. Also, I think the majority of people do not use their fireworks responsibly and I am surprised there aren’t more accidents.
It must be a girl thing….I love sparklers too!
I just want to say how glad I am that you cameback to blogging. I always enjoy reading yours. I feel I’m there as you photograph and describe it all so well.