Blowing up the In-laws (Monday, Dec. 05, 2005)

Ahhhh, fireworks night, arguably one of my favourite nights of the year. OK it was now a month ago but I'm still playing major catch up on my diary. The first thing about fireworks night is that difficult decision you have to make - do I spend �5 each on my family to go to a truly impressive local fireworks display where they spend the best part of 10's of thousands on an array of fireworks, or do I spend over �100 on my own fireworks and risk life and limb in the confines of my relatives small garden?

Obviously a no-brainer, and with that I went to the local supermarket to get a selection of 'big' fireworks. A tip for all would be pyromaniacs - if the firework doesn't specify that the audience should be 25 metres away from the firework, it aint worth buying. Don't worry that your garden might only be 10m square, if you don't get this then you're just missing the fun.

So with a boot full of deadly explosives off we set to my in-laws. They were excited at the prospect of hosting a fireworks display for the 'children' and had bought a fine platter of food, and invited various other relatives. So the time came and everyone gathered on the patio as the first rocket was lit. Wow, what a noise! The screams of crying children that is who had clearly been temporarilly blinded by the glow of burning magnesium, so they went for the safety of watching from the dining room, along with most of the relatives.

Meanwhile, my brother in-law and I started to light the fireworks with a little more bravado, especially after a few glasses of rum and coke. After the first 5 or 6 fireworks we realised that it was going to take a while to get through the pile of incendiary devices. That's when we had the bright idea of setting four fireworks off at a time, by twisting their fuses around each other and lighting one big fat fuse. This was shaping into a seriously impressive display.

First snag was when my brother in-law got a bit greedy and went for a 6 fuser, the surge from 6 fuses was enough to give his hand a good scorching and off he ran to the sink to douse his hand in cold water. That sobered us up a bit so we went back to the one each at a time approach. Everything was fine from here on in, yes the odd firework went off at 45 degrees and narrowly missed the house but that's pretty much par for the course. That was until the last rocket from the packet.

See the problem with this rocket (obvious now in hindsight) was that the wooden stick that you place inside the tube was a little thicker than the previous rockets. I say a little thicker, what I actually mean is that on the previous rockets the stick had been about the thickness of a large chopstick, this rocket had a cricket stump attached to the side of it. Regardless, we forced the rocket into the tube, reassuring ourselves with statements like "the force of the rocket will clear it from the tube", not quite believing it.

So we light it - there's a big surge of light and sparks from the fuse - and no movement. Just a gradually increasing burnt patch on my father in-laws perfectly manicured lawn. For some reason we just stood their watching, until at about the same time we realised that the magnificent blasts we'd been watching 100 feet in the air was about to happen at ground level. And it was at this point that the sprint into the kitchen commenced. Just as the last of us dived into the kitchen, it exploded - the noise was deafening, and far in the distance, the faint sound of an air-raid siren starting up could be heard.

We saw the humour in it as we'd all just made it into the kitchen in time, until we went back outside that is. See in our rush to get inside, we'd completely forgotten about my wife's elderly aunt who had been calmly watching the proceedings from a patio chair in the corner of the garden. When we returned, she had this frozen look of shock on her face (think scary Mary from the Phones 4 U advert) and didn't respond to anything anyone said. We lead her inside, her expression not changing, and we realised that she had been temporarily deafened by the blast.

Fortunately after 20 minutes and a couple of G&T's she was fine, but for a minute there.....

Roll on next year...

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