Monday, November 13, 2006

Remember, remember...

We had a second firework night on Saturday. What else are you going to do when you saved two Roman Candles from the previous week and picked up a cut price display box from town? The kids did express their concerns that I was buying the fireworks from a shop that specialises in practical jokes but, once darkness fell and the rain stopped, they were almost enthusiastic about standing out back, shivering, and having loads of similar-looking fountains let off into the air. The first signs that these hazardous objects had come from a joke shop were evident when I couldn't get the Catherine Wheel to spin (although that might have had more to do with my inept installation). Luckily, the neighbours were out and didn't have to see the fence post catch fire.
The piece-de-resistance, though, and accompanied, or would have been if I'd thought about it, by Handel's Water Music suite, was the final Roman Candle. I'd taken the precaution of setting these multi-shot beasts off in the garden waster burner. The Roman Candle obviously harboured dreams of escaping such a claustrophobic environment and, just after the touch paper had been lit, fell over. Once it swung into action, bangs, whistles and stars were exploding in all directions, bouncing off trees, the roof, heads, arms and legs, and the kids were pinned to the wall. Luckily, daughter stared danger in the face before running around the corner to safety, and captured a small snippet of it on her mobile phone which, in a fit of TroubleonWestbourneism and just to see if it works, we present for your short attention span:





Typically, it was at this point, with the Apocalypse in full force, that the neighbours returned, although they didn't hang about to watch or chat. I got over the trauma by sending the kids to surf the internet and drinking the house dry of Malibu and Coke. It was either that or the £3 bottle of whisky we bought from Nettos three years ago.

In other, techy geek, news, I've started using Mozilla's email client Thunderbird, which frees me up from having to login to Tiscali's clunky, slow moving webmail site and lets me view my email like a normal human being, without getting bogged down in the weight of something 'orrible like Outlook. It reminds me of the days of discovering Eudora.

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