johninnit

Commiserations to Cllr Kerron Cross (and especially his cat), who seems to have had a pretty miserable firework season. I’ll declare up front that I do like fireworks very much, so am rather partisan, but I’m not sure though that a ban is the best way to deal with growing firework bother.

I often have to check myself these days, in case my increasingly regular pronouncements on the wastefulness of today’s standards of living (don’t get me started on mini-motos and patio heaters) betray my transformation from angry young man to grumpy old man, but in this case I think I’m justified in harking back to my 70’s childhood, when fireworks were small, ground-based and rather unspectacular. For something impressive you had to go to a public display, but for the back garden, a little box of Screamers, Traffic Lights and Air Bomb Repeaters, was more than enough to wow the kids and make Dad feel useful.

But we’re all ‘pro-sumers’ now, and our firework displays are no exception. Stores now sell the same monster rockets you see on Clapham Common bonfire night, and we’ve got the cash for them, so everyone is now staging displays big enough for a crowd, just for their own families and friends. The result is the growing state of annoyance amongst pet-owners, pensioners, and anyone who likes quiet life.

The danger is on the up too, with serious amounts of explosives in homes and shops. If you look at the side, they now say to either leave 25m or 50m clear around the firework in case it did detonate at ground level. Obviously nobody does this, as they don’t have the garden space, so you’ve kiddies, flammable garden waste and likely neighbours well within a blast zone. What worries me most, is where those 3’ wooden poles go to – they can’t totally burn up, surely? Are they raining down on peoples’ heads in Croydon? Fireworks are being imported from all over, much cheaper than the UK manufactured tiddlers, and with less idea about the safety standards behind them.

So how about a bit of back to basics? Ban all fireworks for public sale over a certain volume of gunpowder (I think there would be a long queue for the job of Head Firework Tester at the HSE). Make a chartermark (which you can tax to subsidise the Fire Service) for those manufacturers who take up the challenge of making small fireworks to a high standard of safety. Make the sale of any firework without the chartermark an offence, with high fines. Adhering to a local standard would also limit dodgy imports (a bit protectionist mebbe, but would help out UK makers like time honoured favourites Standard).

People would still get small displays if they really want them, but anyone in favour of big thrills goes to a public display (I’d certainly want to run a display for my son when he grows up, but I’d hope we wouldn’t care if it was just a quick ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at a Traffic Light and a wave of a sparkler over a cup of hot Vimto). Even the noisy ones of yore, like the fabled Screamer, weren’t that noisy in comparison to today’s megarockets, so a lot of the neighbour annoyance might subside.

However….

Before killjoys like Kerron and I either ban or tax your fireworks, I do heartily (and hypocritically) recommend letting off a big ‘un at least once in your life. When I lived in South Oxford and still had a garden, I used to spend most of my firework dosh on one big rocket (yes, yes, flagrantly breaching the distance guidelines) and hold a very short firework display for friends.

Lighting it is quite different from a little rocket, and a very different experience to a big display. Start the wick (no piddly blue touchpaper here) and peg it back to your pals. You can feel the air sucking in at ground level as you go, and with a whoosh, it’s off and powering up and up, seeming like it’s taking a bit of you on board with it, til it splashes out across the sky, illuminating the whole street for a split second and a ‘thump’ that you feel in your chest, and you’re left with a sheepish grin on your face, and a burning urge to say “See that? I did that!”.

Heh heh. Like I said, I like fireworks, I do…