Firework Night
Attended Wellington’s annual fireworks display down on the waterfront last night.
It was a beautiful clear night and enjoyable bar my feelings of worry over the environmental impact of igniting several tonnes of gunpowder over the harbour.
One assumes that there are some very stunned (and likely choking) fish out there.
I also realised half way through the preceedings that two of the dear friends with whom I attended (one of Irish and one of Italian descent) were likely Catholics.
Whilst I think that it is extremely important that we Brits (and our former colonies) mark this important historical event, which commemorates a Catholic plot to detonate the House of Commons during the opening of Parliament by King James I. I wonder how long before the powers that be deem it as being too sectarian.
I actually attended one a couple of years back with my then girlfriend (of Polish Catholic descent) and a number of her former schoolfriends. Were around an hour or so into the festivities (the traditional near ocular misses with a sparkler, paying three pounds fifty for a styrofoam cup of ‘mulled wine’ that smells like marine diesel etc.) when I realised that, being a good Catholic girl, she had attended a Catholic school. Thus, of the eight attendees, I was the only one whom wasn’t present to, in fact, celebrate my own persecution.
Was this ratio likely to be the same across the rest of the crowd (or dare I say it, congregation)? Is this another example of the emotional self-flagellation that my athiest upbringing has left me unable to fathom?
In a moment of self-righteous pique some years previously, I suggested to the parents of a preschool Trick or Treater that they “come back on firework night for ‘penny for the Guy’ as it was actually a British tradition, rather than a US one that stupid people have chosen to ape after seeing it on Dawsons Creek”. That went down nearly as well as the choc ices that my sister attempted to foist on several (frozen to the bone) five year olds a little later.
“Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason that gunpowder treason, should ever be forgot”. Indeed.
