Culture of excess has taken the fun out of Bonfire Night - Sarah Todd
Tonight’s Guy Fawkes Night and the imported warm-up act of Halloween are hugely symbolic. Bonfire Night, as it’s largely known these days, is a fantastic example of our society that always wants more.
More noise, more bright lights, more bangs. A hot dog and a sparkler, maybe a toffee apple, plus a few fireworks on one specific night of the year, are no longer enough. Like everything, such as food portions and completely commercialised Christmas, it has become gargantuan in size.
Not just one evening’s coming together of neighbours, friends and family, but an organised ‘experience.’ A ‘spectacular,’ to throw a lot of money at and even attend more than one, dragging it out over several nights.
It's hard to articulate, but as children we understood such celebrations fell on a weekend some years and school nights on others. There were no pre-booked credit card tickets and multiple incarnations. Look at this year, it’s fallen on a Wednesday; grow up and get over it. Let your children be a bit tired at school the next day. It should be the law that fireworks are only allowed on November 5.
But oh no, not for our great nation’s mollycoddled breakfast clubbed next generation. They will probably get to a lower-key event early doors tonight but have already been to one on Saturday night and have another one or two scheduled over the coming weekend. This level of indulgence, a focus on making each memory bigger and better than the one before, is at the expense of common decency such as regard for vulnerable people, farm livestock, horses and pets.
Meanwhile red tape and our litigious society make it harder than ever for those good old-fashioned community bonfires, once organised by the likes of scout groups and village hall committees, to continue. Pushing people towards the big commercial concerns.
On reflection, we never used to fuss much about animals on bonfire night. It could be the old rose-tinted spectacles, but something makes your correspondent think horses were often left out in next door fields. Cows didn’t stampede; dogs didn’t have mental breakdowns. They can’t have been as loud and displays, with a banger or two at the most reserved for the end, certainly didn’t go on as long. We didn’t need every moment filled; every nerve ending jangled.
Well, what a misery this week. While we’re on, the same goes for all those chumps paying through the nose to ‘pick’ pumpkins that have so often simply been laid out in a field. Yet another ‘experience’ that modern parents feel they are depriving their children of if they don’t sign up for, complete with costumes and the obligatory overpriced drinks.
Not just hot chocolate of course, but loaded with, well, more. Such outings, now of course plastered across social media, always make this reporter think of those children who don’t get such treats. The pressure, just like Christmas and now even Easter, that it piles on. Parents and grandparents having their legs lifted to spend money they just don’t have for an Instagram photo, the modern equivalent of tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.
We have recently returned from our first holiday in half a dozen or so years and made sure, unlike these celebrities that plaster it all over and then come back flabbergasted to find they have been burgled, to keep it quiet.
It took about three days to work out what was so striking about the beach we visited. There was just something about the torsos laid out catching the last of the year’s sunshine. Then it hit. People looked so natural. There were very few Brits and the number of tattoos could be counted on one hand. There wasn’t a single set of cosmetic-surgery plumped lips and the air wasn’t filled with the sickly smell of vapes.
Meaningful tattoos - often related to national heritage or religion - have for generations been an accepted norm where we were visiting. But they weren’t on display, climbing up necks like ivy on a drainpipe.
Does it matter? No, of course not. But back to where we started and our penchant for going overboard, the adage that less is more kept coming to mind. Some of those people on the beach will enjoy a vape, but unlike over here they didn’t have to be doing it all the time. They may well have had a tattoo, but they weren’t wallpapered in them. Talking of wallpaper, they were never plastered in public.
Such observations don’t matter a jot. But in our increasingly unfathomable world, reflecting on, less excessive lives and times can be as near the warm glow of a traditional November 5 bonfire as it’s possible to get.