Bonfire, November 2026

Having A Blast

There is a certain pleasure, known only to the British and possibly a few confused Belgians, in walking through London on a crisp November evening while the whole city tries to blow itself up in remembrance of a man who failed to. I set off from the house with a camera round my neck, a scarf wound so many times that I looked like a man being slowly consumed by knitwear, and the vague notion that I might take one or two photographs of genuine artistic merit. Within minutes the air had the smell of a thousand gently smouldering sheds, and somewhere over Hackney a rocket went up with a noise like a cathedral being dropped down a stairwell. The wonderful thing about London's Victorian terraces, I realised, is that they were built by people who clearly anticipated this sort of thing, for every bang hits the yellow stock brick, ricochets down the street, bounces off a pub, and arrives back at your ear about four times, so that a single six-quid firework rocket from a corner shop sounds like the Relief of Mafeking. I stood on a street corner for some time, squinting through the viewfinder at a sky that kept going green and then purple and then, disappointingly, black again just as I pressed the shutter, until I had a roll of film that I was fairly sure would show thirty-six studies of darkness, and possibly a lamppost. A small boy holding a sparkler watched me with the frank pity children save for adults who are plainly not enjoying themselves properly. But I was, you see, I really was. There are few finer things in life than wandering home through streets that smell of gunpowder, ears ringing pleasantly, hands numb, entirely certain that you've captured nothing at all and not caring a bit.