John K Mitchell's Misc Blog

It's fireworks night here in the UK. We went to a local display put on by the Scouts and Guides near us and for the best part of an hour watched all sorts of fireworks being set off. It makes me wonder how much it costs to put on a display nowdays, I know that another local display budgets for £15,000 in fireworks! Multiply that by the number of large displays in the country and then add in the small parties in back gardens, as a nation we must be spending millions just to set fire to gunpowder each year.

I wonder what Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators would have made of the fact that we celebrate the failure to blow up Parliament 400 years ago by blowing up small tubes of explosives and burning replica's of him on a bonfire?

As I sit here at 10:15 in the evening I can still hear the occassional explosion, thankfully its got quieter now and my dog is not worried by the odd loud bang. What ever happened to the "pretty" fireworks that I can remember as a child 40 years ago - all the modern ones seem to be deisgned to go off as loudly as possible.