Remember Remember

The fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. So begins the poem in honour of November fifth. Guy Fawkes night to the English, came and went unobserved as it has done for the last 12 years since I left England. A celebration with a quaintly pagan feel about it, it remembers, with bonfires, the burning of effigies of Mr. Fawkes and large quantities of fireworks, the attempt by a certain Guy Fawkes to blow up the houses of parliament on November 5th 1605 as a protest against the intolerant attitude of James 1st towards protestants.

In the town where I grew up, Lewes, the whole thing takes on a much more local flavour recalling the burning at the stake of 17 Protestant martyrs, and the torchlit processions through the streets end up at a number of huge bonfires around town with, in the case of the most hardline bonfire "society" the detonation of an effigy of the pope and lots of anti catholic chanting. Not a custom I tend to bring up when chatting about English traditions here in Spain. One wonders whether now, exactly 400 years on, it is not perhaps time to simply forgive and forget.