Whiz bang wallop

I've got home from watching the fireworks.

I'm a big fan of Guy Fawkes night, partly because I always enjoyed the ambiguity of whether or not we were celebrating his being caught, or the actual act he was attempting. Political sophistication aside, there's always the whizz-bang prettiness of fireworks and besides, I'm a bit of a winter person and nothing encompasses the cosiness of the season better than fireworks night.

Over the past two or three years social anxiety has got the better of me and I've stayed in, resenting all the fun that everyone else seems to be having. But not this year.

All in all it was rather disappointing. Things always are when they're viewed with the rose-tinted lens of childhood. It's interesting watching a tradition change perceptibly in your lifetime. Bonfires are gone, the burning of political caricatures has been copyrighted by certain extremist groups. Also its fireworks night, rather than Guy Fawkes. I'd like to blame political correctness gone mad on this one, or the increasing ignorance of the young, but suspect its one of those more subtle, more complicated shifts in society (a meme, if you like that word, which personally I do not). So really it was just a bunch of flashy lights, a lot of smoke and a lot of good will - in the end it was that last point that made it worth attending.

The streets were so crowded I ended-up walking through a large chunk of East London before I had a realistic chance of getting on a bus. Standing at a bus stop in some out-of-the-way (and allegedly troubled) part of London, iPod caroling me with a deeply moody soundtrack, feeling self-assured and confident, a part of me thought, "I always wanted my life to be like this". Now that is cause for the lights in the sky.