DRAMA AT THE FIREWORKS

L rang. “Come over for the fireworks on Sunday!

“Right. Thanks”

“We’re starting at 7 o’clock. Byee!”

And she was gone. As she usually goes leaving one, mouth open, on the point of saying something but not quite getting around to it.

So we trek over in the darkness at the appointed hour, walking self-consciously up the drive with a seventeen year old school chum of one of L’s daughters, dressed as a cat.

L divides her time between London, Wales and Las Vegas. There is a lot to fit in. Things have to be compressed. In this case Bonfire Night and Halloween. Inside the front door a job lot of witches hats lie strewn on the floor and life sized stocks hang on a grey chain from the newel post.

In the kitchen a chocolate fountain cascades merrily. Part of spell-making operations, no doubt. L’s husband barks exasperated orders, shooing us out again into the cold and damp. Flocks of seventeen-year olds, dressed as minor camp, more camp and extreme camp, waft in and out in various states of undress.

We grasp a tumbler of mulled wine - sweet and spicy and stand beside the bonfire, built with the old apple tree that collapsed under this year’s weight of fruit. Some still sits in my kitchen, waiting forlornly to be turned into something edible.

The adults huddle together eating the Shepherd’s Pie of which an exceedingly large quantity has been provided for the occasion. We hunch over paper plates, wrapped fast in our coats, gloves and scarves. We have done these fireworks parties before. It’s not the cold, it’s the damp, that gets to you. That and the drifting smoke from the bonfire. Across the court I note a baby in a pushchair, fast asleep, and with no obvious sign of belonging to anyone. I wonder if it is real or a piece of surrealist art.

I have stood on the decking of cousin’s David’s Alberta house, barefoot and wearing no more than a dressing gown, with the thermometer reading minus 22 degrees and not felt cold like I feel the cold here. I doubt that it is less than 7 degrees above freezing but my nether regions refuse to believe I am wearing any clothes at all.

The young, by contrast, appear to be running a competition for who can wear least, though as at the same time they are also running a competition as to who can appear most gothic it is clear there is a conflict. One enterprising lass, I note, solves the dilemma by wearing just one stocking beneath a school shirt in disarray. They, of course, are impervious to cold.

Somebody starts lighting fireworks which fizz, bang and whoosh into the night. We make the appropriate ‘ooh-ah’ noises. Someone thankfully has removed the baby. Clearly not a piece of surrealist art then.

I have to say that I stopped being hugely interested in fireworks at the age of nine. In great millennial displays that consume the annual budget of a small African country in ten minutes they are, I confess, quite pretty, provided you can watch them indoors. But the whoosh, bang, pop of the garden rocket is quite frankly pathetic. See one momentary starburst and you’ve seen them all.

In my boredom I start thinking about how fireworks could be ‘improved.’ The pretty fireworks are the ones that sit on the ground and spew out coloured sparks. ‘Golden Rain’ they used to be called. The more expensive ones even ran to a rainbow of rich primary colours.

In my mind I attached these to three or four rockets which carried them high in the sky whence they descended on some species of incombustible parachute, Golden Raining as they went. And why only one ‘whoosh’ to our rocket, I wondered? Much more interesting surely would be to couple three or four rockets together in one tube so that the first rocket then ignited the second high above the roof tops and then the third and finishing with three rockets worth of starburst.

By the time we could safely retreat indoors, I had come to the conclusion that I had somehow quite missed my calling in life. Had events taken a different turn, I might have become a famous pyro-technician, lighting up the sky from Llantwit to Llandudno.

Nobody else, needless to say, seemed impressed by this idea. But at least there were now the remains of the cake, tea and chocolate fountain or whatever was left by the time the Goths had ravaged it and retreated to the attics to do whatever seventeen- year old Goths do do in attics.

Host Goth continued to waft around for a bit like the Queen of the Night in faux furs, seeking inspiration from the adults for what she might do after A levels.

“Go to Drama School,” I suggested.