So, on Saturday we had a party.

It was great, everybody just about fitted into the house with a bit of spillover into the garden. There was plenty of food and drink. Almost everybody was able to come along so we soon reached the essential critical mass required for the thing to become self sustaining.

There was of course the small matter of the fireworks......

When me and a pal decided to have a fireworks party we put up a web invitation with had three choices: "I'll come and bring a firework", "I'll come and pledge towards the cost of fireworks" or "I won't be coming". The icing on the cake was the trailing "prize for the best (UK legal) firework". It seems that this brought out the best in everyone.

The light was failing when we realised that some of the enormous fireworks needed burying a foot deep, or nailing to the fence or in one case staking into the ground. So a rapid sortie into the garden with spade and hammer was required. We got that all done just as guests bearing fireworks arrived. More huge fireworks equals more digging. This continued until it became difficult to find space at the back of the garden for holes. Perversely, holes take up a lot of room. Anyway, more and more fireworks arrived until it looked like we were done. Then I opened the front door to allow another guest inside only to see one of my colleagues venturing up the path manhandling the biggest box of fireworks I've ever seen. Obviously the shop also had a special deal on 'Cheeky grins' because he had one of those as well.
 

At this point there was a lot of well natured swearing and laughing as we tried to work out what on earth we were going to do with the extra fifty or so large insendury devices in the box.

The final hoard was between £400-£500 worth of fireworks, not one of them smaller than your fist and the biggest were the size of grocery boxes.

The party was well underway when the final guests arrived and it was time to start lighting fuses.

It must have been around 7.30pm when we realised that we were pushed for time as it's not really allowed to set off fireworks after 11pm here (unless it's Nov 5th). Apart from that it would be really boring to watch 4 hours of individual fireworks going off. We needed to parallelise, so we got a couple of volunteers....actually I'm not sure had had to "get" them, they seemed to materialise ,very enthusiastic, giggling, foaming at the mouth, hopping back and fourth on the spot and prepared with gas powered lighters despite being non-smokers. Deeply suspicious.

The front room was full of computer games for the smaller guests just in case they didn't like the noise. So we were set.

The four of us started to grab fireworks from the stack of "smaller" ones and with cries of:

"Ready?", "Yes ready!", "Hang on.. Ready", "Mines already lit!", "Cheese it" etc. etc.

We set them all off four at a time working up to the biggest scariest ones. The display was punctuated with twenty or so huge rockets which were absolutely spectacular. I lost track of how long it took. I think it was over an hour and I ended up feeling a bit odd thanks to running up and down the garden breathing in exotic chemical smokes over and over again. It turned out that "Theakston's Old peculiar" was the antidote, convenient.

In amongst the array of explosives there were just a few that deserved special mention:

PROTON BOMB - 16 really loud reports.
RAGNOROCK - This was great to look at and seemed to just keep on going.
Colour Crosettes - Spectacular but I wish I had known the tubes were angled as it was getting perilously close to the shed!
Royal 2000 - Display in a box! Has the endearing quality of stopping half way through to tempting you back across the garden before beginning again with gusto.
Fish - The children's favourite. A sea of sparks with flying fish.
MAMMOTH WHEEL 8 - My personal favourite, not only did this look great but it created an absolutely devastating slow oscillating sound pressure wave which melted everyone's brain.

The star of the show was "three blind mice" this deserves special description simply because it is the most bizarre thing.  After half an hour of slowly building toward Armageddon you light this firework. It sits there for a while doing nothing and then after the pause it 'squeaks' out the tune to three blind mice and just when it's getting repetitive it goes slightly off key for comedy effect. Such an incredible change of pace, it had us roaring with laughter and it won the prize.

Considering I've only described a selection of the fireworks, where was the real damage taking place? In the back garden where alcohol, idiots and explosives were freely mixing? Nope, the front room where the kids managed to pull the door from the hinges.

The small downside to all this festivity was that for every fizz, whizz, pop, squeak and bang there was a corresponding small cardboard wadding disc on my lawn. They took a lot of picking up. This picture shows a wheelie-bin liner full of "smaller" spent fireworks!

I have to thank everyone who helped preparing food, shopping, doing more tidying, bringing extra chairs, you know who you are.

Oh and special thanks to everyone in my street for putting up with it.

Ta ta.