Une bonne idée, comme un bon fire!

(This was originally published on 05 November 2009, on my now defunct blog.)

[Warning: this may be bawdy - it's from England afterall.]

The Americans gave the English Haloween, the least I can do is give America this reminder of a very British holiday.

Tonight is Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes Day ….
In case you’d forgotten!

We all head over to Midsummer Common at sundown – which is at 4:23 p.m. today.  (… which means I’ll be in the dark before the end of lunch time in Florida or not quite the end of breakfast in Texas.)

We’ll all join hands around a huge, literally flam’n fire.  There’s already what looks like the worlds tallest wooden Christmas tree on the spot where the Circus – Zippos : yes that’s a lighter in the states: they were hot – tent stood just last week.  And, on the pile (a word that means "stately mansion" in the British English of the posh, the well-to-do, or "home-sweet-home" in the British English of the common folk), which is formed from remnants of shipping pallets, there is hung the dried cow-pies (pats in British English) left on the Common by the grazing chocolate cows only just days before Zippos arrived.

And, once our hands are locked, we will all sing Who-Ha Who-Ha – or whatever Who-s hear when they’re not being heard by Horton.

And, then, … then, we will set off bigger-than-Fourth-of-July fireworks to commenorate the Gunpowder Plot that might have blown up a Reformation Parliament if ol’ Guy weren’t caught and, himself, set alight first.   Fawkes told those who stopped him that he was just rolling a kegger into the keep for the Parliamentarians to get high on after a hard-day’s work.  (Days are short here, if you haven’t gathered, in an English Fall and Winter.)  No one bought it.  But, that’s why they don’t serve beer on the Common.  That and, I suppose, they don’t want any drunken Yobs stumbling out of the Common, across Butt Green, an adjacent expanse of pitted lawn, and into the traffic of Maiden’s Causeway, which is a road.

I understand that a local Vicar – that’s a priest who is married – our former neighbour, Roger Williams, may give a benediction.  David just can’t stop marvelling: he came all this way from Road Eye-lan, only to encounter the reincarnation of the State’s founder, erm (that’s how we spell “um” here – same pronunciation … the “r” - when not at the beginning of a word - is like an “h”), Roger Williams.  The name is even pronounced Rog-ah Williams as it is in Providence, RI.  (Yes, Barbara Walters fans, Pwahvidence, Roe d'Eye-lan.)

After the fireworks, we’ll try to clog our various blood vessels with deep-fried fish’n'chips or toad-in-ah-hole (that’s something like a pig-in-a-blanket, only much, much bigger) and either served in a dur-ee news-pay-pah, which they call “dead common” here.   Don’t ask me what "dead common" means.  “I’m dying!” used to be shouted during the act of procreation.  So, maybe they just mean that they weren’t born royalty.  British slang is like that: backward after a fashion.  Say in ain’t so: you don’t say NO you say it’s ON.  (I jest.) … Like your American “bad” meaning like Michael Jackson when he was still alive, or, Phat with its Khmer (oh, Cambodian) spelling.

I understand that chili is a more traditional food for the night – but it kinda won’t stay in the newspaypah.  The Cambridge News doesn’t hold much news as it is.

Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to the candy floss.  It is perhaps the only floss you don’t want between your teeth.  No more said.  No more.  You all call it cotton candy in the States.  Unlike fish and the toad that’ll be wrapped in newspaypah, the floss will be wrapped around newspaypah.  We like recyclin’ ‘e-ah.

We were all told to bring our torches and to watch out for the Yobs.  When they said “torches”, I assume they meant flashlights – British English is so quaint.  But, if a flashlight is torch, what then is torch?  I keep seeing that Frenchman’s painting: Zees ees not a peep, and, envisioning a scene from Frankenstein: the villagers carrying fire at the end of a fag – speaking of quaint, a burning fag is not what it used to be in the American deep south, i.e., not me set on fire; it is, rather, a bundle of sticks – fire wood, in other words.

Nor do I know how a flashlight helps you watch out for the Yobs, unless they really meant a torch.  What, you ask, is a Yob?  You can be forgiven if you think it a troglodyte, arisen from the pages of H.G. Wells 1895 Time Machine.  Like tonight’s fireworks, it is set in England too.  But, those were Morlocks.

The first time I heard the word “troglodytes”, I thought I had heard “frog luddites” - some frogs, you know, do savage themselves away in caves, adverse to the technological progress of home building, as depicted in 19th Century kiddie-lit (in evidence I offer you Caldecott’s 1889 Frog a would a wooing go), or, the wonders of high speed Internet.

No, a Yob – literally boY, spelled backward – is just a social misfit.  Maybe they take their Swift – the writer, not the bird – seriously here in Cambridge.  I’m refering to his treatise of 1729 on eating Irish babies; A Modest Proposal, it was called.  Why should it not be turned on the wayward, hoodie-youth gathering in our parks, on our greens (that's a park, not a salad) and lurking amidst our commons (that's a park too, just more sociable)?  I understand that, like chestnuts, they’re best over an open flame.

You ask me, that’s what happens when you go holding a mirror “up to society”.  The social contract fails you, ev-ery time.  Socialized medicine, indeed.

A swift, by the way – the bird, not the writer – is a troglodyte too.  It gets confusing.  That’s why we have fireworks this evening.  Clears the mind in the same what it clear's the night sky of birds.  Though apparently, it may make getting to work a bit difficult tomorrow morning, what with all of the bonfire smoke laying over the low, rolling East Anglian landscape.

Oh, yeah … now I remember.  When in doubt as to an English word, speak French.  If a British torch is an American flashlight, then an American torch is a British flambeau.   Flambeau: that’s French, for flambeau.

Expect to hear it during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.  “Dame Brindley is now carrying the Olympic flambeau into the stadium.”  Of course, they may duck the issue for the international audience and call it simply, "the Olympic flame".

Forgive me for thinking of Dame Brindley.  1948 was the last time that the Olympics was held here, in London – Austerity Olympics they were called; post-war deprivations and all that rot.  It's austerity England again.  And, with so many librarians being put out to pasture, I imagine Dame Brindley, THE Librarian, would jump at the chance to enlighten a stadium.

Rot, by the way is an example of that other fine tradition in British slang: the Rhyme.  You see it all over children’s books.  No wonder there are Yobs and Lirgs bounding to the assistance of old ladies everywhere as they cry out: I floss me teeth in a glass of wahtah on each an’ every night!  Translation: she looses it when frightened, calls the bobbies ’round, who rolls them Yobs off to a jail cell for the eve-nin.  Rot doesn’t mean rot.  It means lot … as in all that lot.

Anyway, the Olympics previous to 1948 was the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

My mind is just crack’n, I suppose.  ‘36.  Berlin.  Nazi.  Fire.  Book burning. – Librarian’s humour. -  And, voila (that’s English for “sha-zam!” and French for "told you so") … Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.  I can just picture it, she places the flambeau into the Olympic cauldron, and, racing outward around the stadium’s electronc displays …. pages of books and manuscripts held in British libraries: Magna Carta, Doomsday Book, etc.  And, what could be finer for the Austerity Olympics of 2012.  The Magna Carta, which started it all!  And, the Doomsday Book … it is going to be 2012, after all.

Well, the world’s not going to end this evening – okay, this afternoon.
But, I wish you were here!  It's Bonfire Night!