Hello!
This week, I think we can all sympathise with the artist whose skills did not quite fit the brief:
Anyway, I’m sure that like me all your attention has been on events over the pond this week. I’m not going to add to the reams of words being written about that (not right now anyway) so settle in for a little distraction based on my love for Bonfire Night. Plus a few articles I enjoyed this week. And my own attempt at a medieval illumination.
Happy Friday!
Remember, Remember…
As you grow up, one of the things you discover is that not every family has the same traditions as yours, the same habits, the same sayings. Occasionally you discover that your family is just plain strange (not mine, obviously). I went through a similar process about the village I grew up in. I sort of knew that Bonfire Night was not the same outside of Sussex but I didn’t really process it. And the problem is that people in other places think that they do Bonfire Night. They have firework displays. Sometimes there is even a bonfire, potentially some dressing up. But it is not the same. When you talk about processions of flaming torches or bonfire bishops people start to look at you a bit funny.
Luckily it is the fireworks that I love best. The most normal, the most acceptable bit of Bonfire Night everywhere. I love the anticipation before the fireworks begin. I love the transient light and colour of the displays. The whizzes and the bangs. It feels elemental. Its joy that you have to take because it is gone so fast. Apparently, all the reasons I like them are science.
But it is not just science. It is history. At the big London events they have laser displays and pop music soundtracks. I tolerate this. But the best displays are the ones in the village where I grew up. They are the best because deep inside me I know that this is what Bonfire Night is. They are brilliant and beautiful, intimate and spectacular. No need for music, just the shared hush with hundreds of others as you wait and watch. You feel the loudest bangs in your body before you hear them. Ash falls in your hair from the fireworks over your head. The crowd is packed together on the village green, silent as the last explosions fade away before quiet whistles and whoops of appreciation start to ripple in the dark.
I grew up with this annual moment. As far as I was concerned, the three big celebrations each year were Christmas, Easter and Bonfire Night. I suspect that some people in Sussex may reorder my priorities. So when I say it is history, I mean it is my history. But then I once found myself in a seminar room in at university with a historian telling me that the ritual celebration of the failed gunpowder plot of 1605 continued until quite recently and I wondered what kind of savage they would think I was to find out that it never really stopped. Occasionally, friends from the outside have accompanied me back to Sussex for Bonfire Night. They enjoy it, up to a point, but there will always be something to them that is deeply strange. What’s the moment that they just don’t understand? For a friend from the American Deep South, the sight of flaming crosses marching down the village high street was rather disturbing. Others find the culmination of the Bonfire Prayer when the entire village shouts ‘Burn him!’ to be like something out of the Wicker Man.
There are times when it feels like Bonfire Night is something I should have grown out of, that we all should have grown out of (will I be allowed back into Sussex if I publish this?). The roots in religious conflict, the pointlessness of ritually burning a man tortured and executed over 400 years ago, the unnecessary danger and violence of the fire and explosions. Surely we are more mature than that? And yet, there is power in ritual, in communal events, in passion expressed but contained. The traditional, joyful expression seems preferable to energy and mischief left unspent.
In The Observer on Sunday, Keenan Malik wrote about how ignorant we are in the UK about so many parts of our history. This summer the focus has been on our ignorance of our colonial past. Malik points out that we are also quite ignorant of so many aspects of our radical, political past. He focuses on the Putney Debates, chaired by Oliver Cromwell in 1647, where participants debated ideas of equality, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The facts of the Civil War - the execution of the monarch, the interregnum and then the return of Charles II - so often obscure the truly revolutionary nature of the ideas that circulated at the time.
In this vein, the radical aspects of Bonfire Night in Sussex are rarely discussed, and all the history attached to it is assumed to be about Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators. Yet it was not, I suspect, a particular attachment to memorialising the gunpowder plot that ensured the survival of bonfire in Lewes and the surrounding area when it fell away in other parts of the country. In the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Bonfire Night was adopted in Sussex as a rallying point for protest against authority. Discontent with economic and social inequality found expression through marching with torches and burning effigies of those in charge. And the more the authorities tried to repress the celebrations they had previously encouraged, the more determined their proponents became. Wunt be druv is the motto of my village’s bonfire society, a Sussex phrase that means people won’t be driven, that they can’t be told what to do. Bonfire Night is a loud and raucous way of keeping that radical independent spirit alive.
A neuroscientist explains ‘Why we are attracted to fireworks’ in The Guardian
Keenan Malik writes ‘It’s true we ignore parts of our history - and not just about our colonial past’ in The Guardian
An episode of In Our Time on the Putney Debates, featuring the much loved Professor Justin Champion who died earlier this year.
Ally Pally have put a film of last year’s firework display online
Reading around the web
Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine.
Rory Stewart reviewed the latest biography of Boris Johnson for the Times Literary Supplement and I think he enjoyed himself.
Under pressure: why athletes choke
A long read from A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore in The Guardian on the moments where it can all fall apart and the various techniques to ensure it doesn’t. It reminded me of one of my favourite recent episodes of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast where she spoke to Matthew Syed, writer and former table tennis player who talks about what went wrong for him at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Solitude, sunshine and sanctuary in the Secret Garden
The Secret Garden is movingly accurate about the quotidian raptures, the feeling of wellbeing and purpose that can be made possible by a day of weeding.
I enjoyed this sweet and sensitive article by Aida Edemariam for The Guardian on Frances Hodgson Burnett and her novel The Secret Garden.
How Stacy Abrams is turning the tide in Georgia
Abrams’s story is political Shakespeare for the way she turned her personal electoral loss into a larger victory: the former candidate who personally encountered racially-driven voter suppression rising up to make sure that, next time, people of colour could vote in historic numbers.
Well, there had to be something about US politics in here, didn’t there?
Until next time…