Remember Remember - a guide to Bonfire Night for young people
Hey youth! Did you know there used to be a British autumn tradition even bigger than Hallowe'en. Yes really. Back when your parents were kids nobody went trick or treating, nobody at all. Nobody carved out pumpkins, nobody dressed up as a skeleton and nobody went round throwing eggs at neighbour's windows. It's true. Instead we had our own festival of darkness and we called it BonfireNight. It was plain simple fun, and we didn't have to spend all our pocket money down at Woolworths if we wanted to join in. Ah, those were the days. So this November 5th why don't you ask a responsible adult to recreate all the excitement of a traditional Bonfire Night? See what you've been missing out on. Who knows, you might even enjoy it.
Step 1: Make yourself a guy Before the big day it's important to be able to extort money from the local population. For this purpose you'll need to create a big rag doll which looks like a bearded religious terrorist. But don't just copy the bloke on the front cover of The Sun, think 17th century Catholic instead. Because this festival is all about shameless religious persecution. Nothing changes.
Step 2: Take your guy out in public Find an old soapbox and attach some wheels to it (or, failing that, go out onto your estate and borrow a pushchair from one of the teenage mums). Then wheel your bundle of rags down to the local shops and hang around outside the library haranguing passers-by. The official cry used to be "Penny for the Guy", but you might want to update that to "A quid or we'll kick your head in".
Step 3: Buy a selection of fireworks Believe it or not, in the old days it was the children who bought the fireworks, not the adults. Shopkeepers thought nothing of selling bangers and jumping jacks to schoolkids with an evil glint in their eye, without a thought for whose eye they might end up in later. Try buying underage explosives today and you'll probably land yourself an instant Asbo and the phrase "irresponsible pyromaniac" on your criminal record. For the authentic retro experience you'll have to send Dad down to the shops instead of you. Not that he'll be able to buy much for ten shillings these days.
Step 4: Build yourself a bonfire In the less enlightened days before global warming, it was every good citizen's duty to tear down a few trees and send dark clouds of carbon emissions wafting high into the sky each Bonfire Night. All this so that Britons could risk setting their gardens alight and then end up smelling of smoke and roast hedgehog for the rest of the week.
Step 5: Pick the right evening There's only one correct date to let off fireworks, and that's November 5th. Just as nobody would ever go trick or treating a day early, so fireworks used to be restricted to one night only. Even if Bonfire Night fell on a wet Tuesday, bad luck, a wet Tuesday it was. This may have been a bit strict, but at least it confined all those dog-scaring bangs to a single six hour period.
Step 6: Stand in your garden Do not, repeat do not, go down to the council organised display in the park. Bonfire Night was never about joining in with your local community, it was about showing off in front of your neighbours in glorious isolation. Your amateur Dad would never merit a pyrotechnics safety certificate, but he was once fully entitled to detonate dangerous rockets in the dark from the middle of your back lawn. Blinding.
Step 7: Wait patiently while nothing happens Back garden firework displays are always a disappointment. One Dad can't set off ten rockets simultaneously, not like the professionals down at the park. He can stick one rocket in a milk bottle, but that'll probably fall over and fire horizontally towards nextdoor's cat. He can nail a Catherine Wheel into the shed, but a couple of revolutions later it'll probably fall onto the lawn with a muted splutter. And he can light the blue touchpaper on a Roman Candle, but it may be impossible to tell whether the ensuing two second fizzing is the intended special effect or a product malfunction.
Step 8: Get interactive Never mind, there's always the sparklers to look forward to. Just the one sparkler each, mind, because these used to be an expensive treat. Plus you were always a bit scared they might burn you because that nice presenter on Blue Peter had drummed the fear of God into you earlier in the evening. Look, I can spell my name in letters of fire... oh damn, it's gone out.
Step 9: Make your own entertainment Look, Mum's filled a bucket with water so everyone can try their hand at apple bobbing. Look, she's burnt some sausages under the grill in the kitchen and slipped them into a cheap white roll with some Heinz ketchup. Look, the whole family's standing out in the back garden, wrapped up warm in the dark, watching everybody else's fireworks exploding all around and having a whale of a time. That's how Bonfire Night used to be. Magic.
Step 10: Never waste your time and money doing Hallowe'en again
Step 1: Make yourself a guy
Step 1: Make yourself a guy