Remember, Remember...

The other day someone in The Guardian was wittering on about how terrible it was that the US traditions of Halloween were now overshadowing our indigenous Autumn tradition of Guy Fawkes Night. Well, it’s hardly surprising that, after years of assaults on it by the Health and Safety obsessed, the Fifth of November has gradually lost ground to Halloween. All the fun has been leeched out of Bonfire Night by the continued harping on of killjoys that it is far too dangerous to allow children access to fireworks and that the only proper place to see fireworks is at those sterile and dreadfully dull municipal affairs held in public parks. Gone are the days when we’d gleefully run out into our back gardens clutching a handful of rockets, and proceed to fire them at our neighbours’ houses. Now, that was fun. OK, so a few garden sheds were blown up and some pensioners had heart attacks as rockets crashed through their windows and exploded, but it was all good harmless fun. I miss the simple joy of shoving lit fireworks through complete strangers’ letter boxes. A few house fires was a small price to pay for the opportunity to let off some adolescent steam – what would people rather youths do at this time of year, dress up as zombies and terrorise people by knocking on their doors and demanding chocolate with menaces?

With Halloween effectively sanitised from its pagan origins, and virtually any whiff of horror expunged from it – the kids don’t even dress as monsters any more, it’s all fairies, spacemen and Teletubbies – it appeals more to the killjoys. Clearly, we traditionalists have to fight back. We need to reclaim this part of the year for mindless pranks with legally sold explosives. The most obvious starting point is to use our fireworks to launch attacks on those bloody trick-or-treaters. If they come knocking on your door, just fire a rocket at them through the letterbox. That’ll show the little bastards what for. Instead of burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes – or even Jonathan Ross or Russell Brand, this month’s favoured hate figures – why not burn some trick-or-treater dressed as a witch? It works for me. A clear symbol of Bonfire Night’s cultural victory over Halloween. It would also be tremendous fun.