Monthly Archives: November 2019

Bonfire Night!

It’s been a day full of memories. It always is at this time of year with the crisp air of winter around us, Halloween, my birthday arriving out of nowhere yet again, Christmas fast-approaching, and Bonfire Night!

Actually, in the Northern hemisphere, winter starts on Sunday 22nd December this year (the equinox), but let’s not allow some minor, distorted fact to come between friends on a ramble together!

Halloween has become a much bigger thing in the UK as the years have gone on, but Bonfire Night is Fireworks Night! In my mind at least it’s the event of the month, based around the UK’s cultural story of Guy Fawkes’s sinister plot to blow up Parliament. Not that I knew much about that at the age of four or five. The ‘Guy’ was a stuffed scarecrow that gave me the heebie-jeebies and had a scary poem to go along with him, haha!

But the fireworks! Oh, how I loved them. Scared as I was at the bangs and flashes! I vividly remember watching my father lighting the fascinating, now-banned Jackie Jumpers and Catherine Wheels, while my mother ‘kept me safe’… watching the whizzing fireworks through the window (you have to laugh in retrospect. Honestly! I was such a scaredy-cat.). Dad coming back in-between each beautifully-sparkling display, to check that I was okay, me smelling the smokey outdoors on his cardigan.

Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman

My music of the time was anything and everything by Cliff Richard, thanks to my older cousin who would visit and play his Cliff-collection of 7-inch vinyl with me.

This recording is on PC playing the Timbres of Heaven Soundfont, featuring a track from Halloween Jukebox.

The Bonfire

The Night. Culminating in the fabulous bonfire! With all the families from the street gathered around, watching and waiting (me about ten paces back, of course, next to Mam and Dad).

I’m looking out of my window here now, the skies are filled with fireworks, and I can smell the cordite in the air (totally in my imagination, cordite doesn’t smell, so I’m told), and waiting, waiting, waiting for those imaginary embers to burn down. Revealing that most wonderful of things… a potato wrapped in foil, cooked under the orange-glowing timbers of the bonfire.

Well, being 2019, in this instance straight from the microwave!