The last council-run fireworks display in Birmingham will not be going ahead this year, because of austerity. Oh, don’t mind me: I’m just stopping all the clocks and cutting all the telephone wires. I’m taking bones away from barking dogs and shushing pianists. I’m on WikiHow trying to figure out how to muffle a drum.
Fun is dead, and the Labour-run Birmingham council killed it. There will be no toffee apples on the streets of Pype Hayes. There will be no sparklers in Sparkhill. Shut the curtains and hide under the bed with your shivering dog, and wait for this pain to go away.
It’s not just Birmingham, obviously: councils up and down the land are pulling their public displays because on a ledger full of pound signs and minus symbols, overseen by an ashen-faced accountant emotionlessly shaking his head, fireworks make no fiscal sense. Because they are pointless explosions in the sky. They are the most literal way of setting fire to money that there is. Lighting a stick of dynamite in a pallet of £50 notes would be about as much of a show and cost roughly the same. Fireworks are, technically, entirely pointless.
But that is ignoring that intangible something about fireworks that is tied deep to all of our bones. There are three ages of firework enjoyment, starting when you are a small child: trussed up in that weird way children in large coats and thick jogging bottoms go when they are swaddled so thoroughly that they turn the rough shape of starfish. You slowly – with great care, and a bucket of cold water next to you for the wires – write out your name with a sparkler, before turning to the sky in wonder as a council-run firework display explodes above your head; then it’s roasted nuts and bedtime. The wonder, the magic, the extremely startling warning videos that run before Blue Peter telling you not to hold a firework in case your face burns off: the bonfire night of our childhoods was like a smoky, autumnal Christmas in terms of excitement.
Then things get all weird and aggressive when you’re a teenager. You wear a shell suit to a fireworks display despite warning pamphlets telling you not to because you are now extremely flammable. That strange boy at your school with a touch of the Dahmers about him spends his evening throwing bangers down alleyways at cats. You and your mates try to buy illegal fireworks from a corner shop but the dude behind the counter is having absolutely none of it. Someone manages to smuggle a three-litre bottle of White Lightning into Queen’s Park. You watch the sky and declare fireworks to be extremely lame.
And then comes adult fireworks night, third-era fireworks night – which is just awful. Tell me which adult in their right mind wants to stand in a park in the cold for two hours, scared to really move in case we “lose our spot”, boots slowly sinking in the mud? There’s the blossoming realisation that your big coat needs a dry clean, the outlay of £6 for something vaguely resembling a hotdog from some nearby stand, as you wait for a man behind a temporary metal fence who seems to excel at balancing a cigarette right on the end of his lip, but who never seems to actually smoke the cigarette even though that stub has been glowing for something close to an hour now. You are waiting for him to press a neat electric button that will make a bottle rocket swish into the sky. “Ooh,” you say, frigid with the cold. “Aah.” And then you wait, along with 2,000 other people, for the same bus home.
Going out on fireworks night, close behind New Year’s Eve, belongs in the category of “begrudgingly leaving the house because you have to: extremely miserable evening”: bonfire toffee on your fingers, the inescapable smell of smoke in your hair – hell.
But that’s veering dangerously close to council-curmudgeon-looking-at-the-budget-and-promptly-pooping-the-party territory. I’m going to enjoy fireworks night this year – whether it’s getting on a high roof and staring as a city explodes or drinking scalding cider in some council-run park. And you should too.
Coo at the sky as it lights up, red and green. Write your name in the darkness with a gloved hand and a lit sparkler. Check under a bonfire for hedgehogs and blow cold air out of your mouth pretending to smoke. Or go full teenager again and play with a lighter while wearing tracksuit bottoms. Point is: it’s dark and cold outside. We all need a little bit of council-run joy in life to keep it warm.
