Happy Bonfire Night for 5th November.

Enjoy your celebration of the safety of the King, unless you're celebrating the attempt. It's amazing how observances and traditions get blurred by the passing years.
 
robd said:
Happy Bonfire Night to all :p

Hope you all enjoy Guy Fawkes night, eat plenty of treacle toffee, parkin cake and baked spuds. Take care with the fireworks!

http://www.bonfirenight.net/index.php
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I remember pushing a wheelbarrow around with a dummy in it asking "a penny for the guy" and the bonfires as a kid in the UK. Here in Australia (which was a British colony), the department stores now push Halloween which is an American tradition. Guy Fawkes Night is now a distant memory in Oz.

Don't remember Parkin Cake though.
 
Euphod said:
Enjoy your celebration of the safety of the King, unless you're celebrating the attempt. It's amazing how observances and traditions get blurred by the passing years.
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It's yet another example of a traditional event that has succumbed to blatant commercialism in the recent past. Supermarkets in the UK push it to gain profit from bonfire night related goods!

pcas1986 said:
I remember pushing a wheelbarrow around with a dummy in it asking "a penny for the guy" and the bonfires as a kid in the UK. Here in Australia (which was a British colony), the department stores now push Halloween which is an American tradition. Guy Fawkes Night is now a distant memory in Oz.

Don't remember Parkin Cake though.
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Ah yes, Penny for the Guy, I had completely forgot about that, I haven't seen it occurring in the UK for many years. Parkin cake is probably a North of England tradition, I'm not so keen on it, it's like treacle cake with seeds and lumps of something in it.

Rob.
 
Bemusingly enough, Euphod has struck a historical point. Many from the community that Guido Fox came from celebrate Bonfire night to celebrate not just the saving of the Monarch but the parliament as well. Just goes to show how things change unwittingly over a long time?!
 
Well we are as bad with diets in the northern part of the Kingdom robd. Scots pies, sausage rolls, black puddings, rolls in square sausage an cakes galore. Small wonder weight is a problem! I would love to have fried bread but got to keep off it now dash it. Used to love a sandwich with butter and treacle as a boy but these things I have to keep away from now whcih is so frustrating so I distract myself with Trainz.As for Bonfire Night when as young boy here in Glasgow there was a joinery business in the next street with a big hard and high fence and for some reason he had scores of old MOD wooden ammuniton boxes. Many of them suddenly vanished the night before Guy Fawkes. Somehow the following evening they turned up under a dummy of Fawkes in a pile of wood for the bonfire. By thetime he found out it was too late but the neighbourhood has the biggst bonfire for a long time!
 
rjhowie said:
Well we are as bad with diets in the northern part of the Kingdom robd. Scots pies, sausage rolls, black puddings, rolls in square sausage an cakes galore. Small wonder weight is a problem! I would love to have fried bread but got to keep off it now dash it. Used to love a sandwich with butter and treacle as a boy but these things I have to keep away from now whcih is so frustrating so I distract myself with Trainz.As for Bonfire Night when as young boy here in Glasgow there was a joinery business in the next street with a big hard and high fence and for some reason he had scores of old MOD wooden ammuniton boxes. Many of them suddenly vanished the night before Guy Fawkes. Somehow the following evening they turned up under a dummy of Fawkes in a pile of wood for the bonfire. By thetime he found out it was too late but the neighbourhood has the biggst bonfire for a long time!
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Reads like a menu to an early heart attack. I presume the ammunition boxes were empties!

rjhowie said:
Bemusingly enough, Euphod has struck a historical point. Many from the community that Guido Fox came from celebrate Bonfire night to celebrate not just the saving of the Monarch but the parliament as well. Just goes to show how things change unwittingly over a long time?!
Click to expand...

I think Guido Fawkes may be remembered more specifically from the spectacle of the somewhat gruesome and bloody execution he suffered.
 
Last edited:
Yes, I am curious too.

The Guido Fawkes matter was a politcal and religious thing which for most people has disappeared in time. Oh and those boxes robd were definitley empty. Cildren in Glasgow in my day were clued up cookies!
 
Someone once told me that Guy Fawkes was the only man ever to enter Parliament with honourable intensions. ;)

I couldn't possibly comment.
 
I was surprised when I saw that an effigy of Lance Armstrong had been put on a bonfire! Some towns, eg. Lewes, like to have celebrity 'Guys' on their bonfires, but I thought it was going a bit far in his case. Maybe that town had lots of cyclists in it?

I too did 'penny for the Guy' when I was a lad, though I didn't really like to see them going up in flames, a bit cruel I thought! You don't see them any more do you? Which is probably a good thing as it is an anti-Catholic festival in origin and I'm pleased we've moved on from all that. Probably best just to stick with the fireworks!

Paul
 
In actual fact Fawkes was not even the leading conspirator and more the explosive advisor. You are right that it is good we don't have the religious attitudes of those times now but there needs to be balance on that one as it was far from one-sided (my own ancestors were persecuted by the "old religion") . It replaced a long period when Protestants were worse treated at the Reformation and in Queen Mary's horrible reign. Being tortured, hung, drawn and quartered or burned at the stake in legions. Many RC's followed a path to try and overturn the majority hence the ill-feeling due to intrigue. Indeed those of that faith would have been killed in the Parliament too. Remember that due to massive amounst of explosive it would have destroyed a good number of streets over a wide area. Two wrongs never make a right of course and you are correct that we live in more benevolent time thankfully! Somehow i don't think it is as widespread as it was when I was a boy. I liked a selection of fireworks but my pals always loved geting bangers because they sounded like an explosion!
 
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