Dan Jackson: A lament for Guy Fawkes

WE HAD a bit of a Guy Fawkes evening the other night. It was all very low key.

I brought home a large old washing machine drum and lit a fire in it with some smashed up wooden pallets.

We had a barbecue, and then the kids and their cousins all roasted marshmallows and played with sparklers.

Everyone had a laugh when the drum got so hot it caught fire to the wood that it was sitting on.

My dad and I had the hose at the ready and then we propped it up on bricks and carried on.

When it got properly dark, we put the kids at a safe distance and then, one by one, I let off fireworks from a budget pack we'd bought. It was all good family fun.

No one got hurt, the dog was safely tucked away inside and the kids made some good memories.

I must say, it wasn't like the Guy Fawkes when I was a kid. Then we had massive bonfires that seemed to touch the sky for burning the Guy, and everyone let off skyrockets and crackers.

Our little shindig the other night was but a pale comparison to those 30 years ago but it was definitely in the spirit of them.

I know people say Guy Fawkes has not much to do with New Zealand but it is a tradition stretching back hundreds of years for a good portion of the New Zealand population.

Also, the failure of the Gunpowder Plot was an important bit of history as if it had succeeded, and Britain once again became Catholic and under the sway of the Vatican, who knows how the world could have shaped up? We may all have ended up speaking Spanish ...

But I digress.

There has been talk of calling a halt to Guy Fawkes celebrations and that makes me a little sad.

I know one day fireworks will more than likely be banned as there are too many idiots torturing animals and setting fire to things and, albeit sadly, I probably agree that is what should happen.

I miss the New Zealand I grew up in where, by and large, people could be trusted not to be total morons when it came to safety and consideration of others.

Part of the reason we could trust each other was because, instead of sitting behind desks writing safety plans, people did things - dangerous things - and knew their own limits.

But I digress again ... Guy Fawkes may be the centuries-old celebration of the failure of a small group of religious fanatics but really, for me, it has always been about getting the family together for a bit of fun and teaching the kids a bit of safety around fire and fireworks.

■Dan Jackson is a Whanganui journalist and part-time scrap metal dealer.