What Would Arthur Brown Say?

Dark nights, baked potatoes, visible breath, checking for hedgehogs, unrecognised pagan references, flash and thunder fire, woollen mittens and staying up way past bedtime, extremes of heat and cold.

For many of us in Britain the fifth of November is the only night of the year that we venture outside as a family after dark. It's the only time that we gather with family and friends and eat in the cold and dark, wrapped up against the weather. We're no longer a nation that spends much time outside but for this single evening we put that to one side and celebrate in the way that our grandfathers and their grandfathers would recognise.

But why? Are we really still jubilant about the foiling of a plot to bring down the parliament four hundred years ago? Or is it really just an excuse for revelry, for coming together, for showing the cold and the dark that we humans won't be cast down by such natural unpleasantries, that we now have control over illumination and temperature, that we are now the masters (and potential demolishers) of the environment in which we live?

How many people who oohed and aahed at the flames and the rockets on the fifth of November  know that the original celebrations had strong anti-catholic overtones and the first effigies to be placed atop the burning bonfire were more likely to be of the Pope than of the would-be assassin Guy Fawkes? And how many of us had a small family bonfire in the back garden, complete with our own fireworks display, as was common when I was a boy, forty years ago?

The celebration of Bonfire night seems to be in decline or at the least it seems to be merging with an increased celebration of Halloween (something that went pretty much unnoticed half a century ago) here in England. But don't go thinking that Halloween is an American tradition that we've imported to Britain. No, it was a British celebration that went over to America with the pilgrims. We here let it lapse while the colonial cousins continued it.

The moral is, don't believe everything that you've been taught to be true, especially if you read it on the internet. Remember, once upon a time everyone 'knew' that the earth was flat. Question everything, constantly.

* Bonus points to anyone who can tell us exactly what Arthur Brown would say.

© Shaun Finnie 2013