Anne Dickens | The Day After Yesterday

Us British are bloody party animals, that's what we are. Not content with celebrating just Halloween, we also have a knees-up every November 5th to celebrate something called Bonfire Night, or as it is sometimes known, Guy Fawkes Night.

"What the blazes is all that about?" I hear you cry.

Well, let me explain [pulls chair closer to the fire and clears throat]. Picture the scene; the year was 1603 and Queen Elizabeth I had just snuffed it, and had been succeeded to the throne by King James I. Now, King James did not like Catholics at all (I think he found them a bit shifty), so he persecuted them, which totally pissed off, in particular, a group of 13 young Catholic men.

Let's face it, you can kind of see their point. Being persecuted does get a bit irritating after a while. Anyway, in 1605 the pissed off group of young men decided that they would blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James. They hid 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar of the Houses of Parliament ready for the attack. However a member of the group (and no one is sure who), raised concerns that they would end up accidentally killing innocent people. So he sent an anonymous letter to some bloke called Lord Monteagle, warning people to stay away from the Houses of Parliament on 5th November - the day of the attack.

Lord Monteagle luckily realised that something was afoot, and raised the alarm, as a result of which, the Kings Forces stormed the cellar in the early hours of 5th November.

There they caught one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, red-handed - poised and ready to light the gunpowder. Dear Diary, today was a bad day........

Guy Fawkes was tortured and excecuted until he was dead, and the whole event had a profound effect on the British people. On that very night in 1605, fires were lit throughout the country to celebrate the safety of the King. And to this day, four hundred years later, on every 5th November, fireworks are still let off, a bonfire is still lit, and an effigy of Guy Fawkes is burned.

Crikey, thinking about it... it makes us Brits sound a bit Blair Witch doesn't it? Top tip. Think twice before going camping with someone who hails from the UK.

So that is what I did last night. I hooked up with Steve and Izzy, and we met Steve's friend Guy (crikey, I wouldn't want to go too close to the fire with a name like that) at the Bonfire Party in the next village, called Beckley.


As you can see from the picture above, the fire was enormous but we couldn't get near it because it was cordoned off. That's Health and Safety gone mad that is. In the olden days I remember being little more than a toddler and lighting my own sparklers from a burning log in the bonfire.

Hell, even those burning branches that fell from the top of the bonfire taught us to move quickly. That's why the youth of today is sluggish.


What was also rather nice, was that food had been laid on in the guise of a BBQ. I love BBQs and the food was cheap enough so I ordered two beefburgers (yeh, the diet is going well thanks).

They were tasty, but if I had to make a constructive comment I would say that the burger-to-bread ratio was a bit wrong. I know that the photo above is quite dark, but you can probably see what I mean (if you look at the ketchup circle on the top half of the bread roll, that was effectively the size of the burger).

"How's your burger?" asked Guy.

"Don't know, I haven't got there yet. I am still working my way through the bread bit," I replied.

We stood round munching our food for a while, when all of a sudden, the fireworks started. And I will tell you something, Beckley might only be a small village, but the residents certainly know how to stage a bloody great Bonfire Night.




Ahhh, there is nothing like a Beer Coat for warming you up. Drink two pints and the cold just completely disappears. Happy Bonfire Night everyone!