 |
From the rabbits... with |
Guido really dropped his bundle this year. Guido refers to Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century English soldier who used the Italianised name “Guido” while fighting for Spain. The connection to fireworks comes from his central role in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Anyhoo, I suspect the end is nigh for Guido and fireworks in the backyard.
But he’s had a good run – 421 years of crackers, bonfires, hand, wrist and finger burns, eye injuries, buckets of burn balm, kilometres of Elastoplast, thousands of ACC claims, property damage, animal damage.
Yes, we have paid dearly for your treachery Guido. And I think we are done.
On the night itself there were just a few underwhelming pops, hisses, fizzes and bangs, then the ghost of the Westminster gunpowder plotter shimmied off, back into his Tower of London dungeon and waited to be hung, drawn and quartered.
I won’t go into the specifics of that cruel and unusual practice except it would seriously test your pain threshold. How unpleasant would it be to see your entrails being sauteed on a bonfire before your own eyes?
And your “sensitive nether bits” removed with a blunt rusty blade. And for just plotting. Not actually doing.
What would they have done to him had the 2500kg of gunpowder actually “whoomphed” and blown King James VI all the way back to Scotland?
“Guy, guy, guy,
Poke him in the eye,
Stick him on a bonfire,
And there let him die.”
In the early 1960s, we, the “Charlie Gang” – a bunch of neighbourhood 10- or 12-year-old imps rather than hooligans – wandered round the street chanting that grizzly ditty.
“If you haven’t got a penny,
A ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny,
God bless you.”
We didn’t need God’s blessings because people gave freely of their sixpences and shillings. They had money to burn and we burned it for them.
We bought strings of Tom Thumbs and Double Happies, Thunder Bolts and Mighty Cannons, like a beginner’s stick of gelignite.
We amassed an arsenal and for two or three weeks leading up to November 5, we blew stuff up. For a boy, what’s not to like about loud explosions? Searing flashes of light, rushes of fear and dare? It wasn’t high treason, but could have been construed as wanton damage, disorderly behaviour, excessive noise and bad-ass attitudes. Boom! Bang! Whoosh! It was all crazy, chaotic and dangerous, but you got away with it in those days. Just boys being boys, they said.
Is 60 years after the fact too late to apologise for blowing a letterbox to smithereens around Guy Fawkes? If not, please forgive me. I knew not what I did.
Unwittingly, the “Charlie Gang”, in our own small way, probably would have given Winston Peters good cause to introduce his Fireworks Prohibition Legislation Bill then and there. “Enough,” everyone would have said. “No more public fireworks. And no fireworks, no Charlie Gang!”
Another festival – neither pagan nor Christian – has been getting a foothold in Aotearoa since the 1990s. Like the common cold and taxes, it’s not going away anytime soon.
Halloween is innocent, fun, and kids love it. What’s not to like?
Well, the Grumble Bums, who I call the GBs, don’t like it.
“I put up a ‘Halloween Free Zone’ sign every year,” boasted a GB, a latter-life fun buster. His calcifying liver’s obviously giving him gyp – as it does every Halloween.
“Keeps the horrible little marauders off the lawn.” I must buy him some Andrews effervescent remedy to tame his liver, his attitude, or both. And a bag of lollies, some humbugs, “Ba-humbugs!”
So Halloween night, just as the skeletons, vampires and zombies were fluffing up their best going out cobwebs, GB locked his door, drew his curtains and turned the light off so it appeared no one was home. I hope there was something light and nice on TV that unknotted his undies.
“Halloween’s American,” he said, “None of our business.”
I hope all the dry bones clanking around his neighbourhood and vampires burying canines into jugular veins didn’t mess with his evening too much.
A mum GB also moaned: “I won’t have my night disrupted by an American ritual that doesn’t belong here.” What was there to disrupt? A TV reality show about surviving naked on a snake-infested desert island? “And I won’t buy lollies for kids I don’t know.”
That’s interesting, because up the street her wee poppet was out tricking and treating. Yep, people who Mum didn’t know had bought Halloween treats for her wee poppet, whom they didn’t know. Goose, gander?
Then a wee “Tinkerbell”, all freckles and smiles, flitted up the drive in a pink tulle tutu and a witch’s hat and highjacked my night. She was haemorrhaging from very realistic, deep facial Halloween wounds. “Trick or treat?” she giggled while bleeding out.
I tossed two $2 coins in her bucket and off she skipped. Still bleeding profusely, still giggling. No damage, no burns, no trouble.
At the top of the drive, Tinkerbell’s mum was riding shotgun. Good job Mum, you made a wee girl very happy. And me. Whatever did we ever see in fireworks?