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Remember drifting smoke, tasting of excitement. Remember toffee apples sticking your teeth together. Remember ketchup oozing out of a hot dog onto your gloves. Remember having one cheek blazing from the fire, and the other tingling with the cold. Remember writing your name in a sparkler, and wishing you had a shorter one (name not sparkler). Remember the crash as the guy falls into the heart of the flames, sending up a shower of sparks, more exciting than the coloured ones. Remember ooh! And aah!
Remember gunpowder, treason and plot.
Unless you live in the Scottish Borders apparently.
It's very odd. We spent last week with my parents, and down there every second village is bedecked with posters for its bonfire party, each boasting different attractions; and vying with each other for the best, or wackiest, or most noisy (my personal favourite: the Battle-of-Britain-themed bonfire, which seems strangely inappropriate somehow).
Anyway, we have friends staying this week, and it being a Friday night, I thought it would be a nice thing to do with all our girls this evening: an hour or two of wrapping up warm, and eating too much sugar, squealing a lot, and generally exhausting them out: followed hopefully by an extra hour in bed tomorrow.
But we can't. Because there's nothing. Not in our town, or the next, or the next. In fact the only fireworks event I've heard of is a good twenty miles away and even if we'd wanted to go that far it was last night.
Why?
I thought it was a Scottish thing. It's notable that the one bonfire I have discovered was in England. But then I realised Guy Fawkes tried to blow up a Scottish King (James was VI before he was I after all), so surely the Scots would be just as keen as the English to burn him in effigy. Nonetheless, I wondered whether those north of the Border had a bit of sneaking sympathy for the incompetent chap's efforts to destroy the English parliament, but B assures me (as does everyone else I've asked) that the Scots normally go just as much of a bundle on the flames and bangs as the English do. The image* above is from Edinburgh's 2009 celebrations, so they've clearly remembered....
So why not here? Or maybe it's: why not this year? And, more importantly, how am I going to get my extra hour in bed now?
*Image from edinburgh-inspiringcapital.com. Looks fab doesn't it? Maybe that's one for next year....
