Remember, remember
The Fifth of November:
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
This piece was originally written three years ago, on 6th November 2019. It was intended to be the inaugural article on the blog I was planning to start, but less than six weeks later I was struck down by COVID 19, followed by Long COVID, so the blog got held up by more than two years. This year I stayed in Slamannan, thinking to watch the fireworks here from my window, but there were hardly any compared with previous years – possibly because it’s been so wet for so long this year that they wouldn’t light. I had the same problem a few days ago when I tried to light nightlight candles for Hallowe’en – none of my matches would strike, and I ended up having to light the candles by setting fire to a thin strip of cardboard on one of the hotplates on my cooker.
This, however, is how it was three years ago, just before the pandemic.
Tonight, I went into town to watch the fireworks – although owing to the bus timetable I was only able to stay for 40 minutes. Slamannan Moor stands on a steep-sided escarpment 200 yards above Falkirk, and as you approach the town there’s a point where the road runs along the edge of the drop. Go down one of the side-roads on the Falkirk side and the ground falls away too steeply for buildings, so you have a panoramic view out over the whole town below, and can see the bloom and glitter of rockets all the way out to the Firth of Forth. The night was clear, with a bright half-moon – unusually so, for normally on Guy Fawkes Night the air is so full of gunpowder that it precipitates a thick mist.
Guy Fawkes Night, Bonfire Night, Bone-Fire Night – so much edgier and more ambiguous than fireworks for 4th of July or New Year. Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were genuinely from an oppressed minority but also genuinely terrorists whose plan, if it had succeeded, would have taken out much of central London. Almost the entire British ruling class would have been destroyed in a single stroke and the death toll could potentially have dwarfed 9/11: but as it was Fawkes and his allies were captured, and were tortured and executed with brutal cruelty.
Every year for more than 400 years, except I suppose in wartime, we’ve marked this event by lighting fires or setting off explosions, until the walls boom and the air reeks of gunpowder – but no longer with any clear idea whether we’re celebrating the fact that Fawkes’s attempt to behead the British state failed, or applauding a brave attempt by a brave man. Guy Fawkes has become a folk hero, Fawkes the Phoenix, V for Vendetta, the face worn by anti-Government rebels all around the world – has become Loki, has become personified Death.
As I stood on the hillside looking down at the lights pinpricking into life all across the town, a father and his toddler son passed me, and the child said clearly “Fire, fire!” This is the feast and the face of nihilism, of the dark side of the wheel where what was built is broken down, and we dance in the dark, with sparklers.
