baroque_mongoose

I am... kind of conflicted about fireworks. But I do know for a fact that I don't like them out of place, and last night they were very much out of place. Who sets off fireworks on Boxing Day? (Given the way the wind was blowing at the time, I think the answer was probably someone in the next village; but still.)

When I was a child, I begged and pleaded every year to be allowed to go to a fireworks display, and the answer was always a categorical no. Of course, taking me would have inconvenienced the adults, and the primary rule was you don't do that; I therefore didn't know for a very long time that there was anything more to it than that. So, in about the top year of infant school, we were all told to write about the fireworks we'd been taken to see the night before, because it was taken for granted that the entire class would have got fireworks; they all had, apart from me. So I wrote about what I'd done instead. I'd got a few bits and pieces and come up with an imaginative pretend-fireworks game, because that was all I could do. The teacher was apparently quite impressed with it, and many years later I discovered she'd felt sorry for me.

I must have been over 40 when I finally discovered why I'd never been allowed fireworks as a child. It turned out - and I'd completely forgotten this - that Dad had gone out and bought some fireworks when I was three. I was supposed to be delighted. Unfortunately, being three and rather nervous in any case, I was scared; and not reacting the way you were supposed to was very bad. So bad, in fact, that Dad was furious and vowed that as a punishment I'd never be allowed fireworks again; and sure enough, I wasn't.

Not that I ever wanted to be too close to the things; and this was reinforced rather later in my childhood when this boy, a few years older than I was, with a badly disfigured face arrived in our neighbourhood. I didn't know him personally, and I don't remember being anything much more than vaguely curious (had he been ill?); but after a while I got chatting to someone who did know him, and it turned out he'd been messing about with fireworks and one had blown up in his face. This person got on well with him and was quite defensive on his behalf (which they didn't need to be with me, but I can imagine they'd had to deal with people who saw him as some kind of freak), and they actually said it wasn't his fault he looked like that. I said nothing, but I was thinking... it's very sad that he looks like that, it can't be easy for him, but you've just said he was playing with fireworks when he was far too young to be handling them at all; so, sorry, but yes, it is his fault. And equally well the fault of whoever should have been supervising him.

So I've always been quite happy with public firework displays, where very few people are actually handling the fireworks and there's a whole raft of safety measures in place to protect those people. I've never been so happy with people setting them off in their gardens, partly for safety reasons, and partly because if you have a lot of people doing it then it becomes a nightmare for pets, especially those of a more nervous disposition. Minsky was a rare cat indeed; when Bonfire Night came round, he'd go out for a stroll to watch the fireworks, having worked out a long time ago that they weren't dangerous if you kept your distance. The others were not at all keen on all the noise, and I couldn't blame them.

But at least it was only once a year... to begin with.

I have no idea whose idea it was to celebrate "the millennium" (it wasn't even the millennium; it was New Year's Eve 1999, and the millennium didn't start till a year later) by setting off fireworks at midnight, but if I ever find out I'm having words with them. At length. I have never been inclined to stay up to see the New Year in, reasoning that if it isn't sober enough to find its own way in, then I'm not bothering with it; so that night I went to bed at the regular time, and was both surprised and disgruntled to be woken up just before midnight by a firework going off. "Who?" I thought. "Why? Don't they know this is an unsociable time of night?"

It was only the first. There were a lot of fireworks; they were ridiculously noisy; and they went on for over an hour. After a little while I heard a gentle scraping at my bedroom door, so I put on my dressing gown to see which cat was (entirely reasonably) feeling bothered. To my surprise, it was Minsky. Well, he hadn't been expecting them in the middle of the night either, and, honestly, it was like Beirut out there. Since there was clearly not going to be any sleeping done till all the nonsense was over, I sat down at the top of the stairs and cuddled Minsky instead. I think it did both of us good.

When I finally crawled back to bed, I thought "oh well, at least it's a one-off, and thank goodness it's over". Except that, sadly, it wasn't. People have been setting off fireworks at midnight on New Year's Eve ever since.

Well, m'lud, I object. Being awake at midnight on New Year's Eve is not compulsory, and shouldn't be made so by default. I don't have a problem with Bonfire Night, when the fireworks are mostly for the children and have generally stopped by eight or nine in the evening; but bangs and crashes at midnight, nope. And if people absolutely must have fireworks at that time of night, there should be a law severely limiting the amount of noise they're allowed to make. To be fair, it's never been quite so bad since then as it was on that first awful night; I certainly never got Minsky coming upstairs wanting a cuddle again. But still, it's invariably enough to wake me up.

This year, however, I hope to have the jump on it. This year I have ear plugs!

I slept the laptop overnight, and it's still working so far, albeit on borrowed time. The new one is due tomorrow, and I just have to pray it shows up before the taxi does.

Meanwhile, I think it's about time I introduced the fine fellow in the icon. His name was Minsky, he is no longer with us, but he was the most stunningly intelligent cat I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. When I lived in Sheffield, I had four cats; there was Minsky, there was his brother Chomsky (the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever, since there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both), and then there was a pair of ginger siblings called Klinsmann and Heidi who were about eighteen months younger. They could not have been more different characters if I'd written them.

I also had a lodger. I didn't especially want a lodger, but I had this friend who inherited his mother's lingerie business and it went... er... it failed, shall we say. So he had to sell his house, and nobody else would take him in, so he ended up in my spare room. We will call him Bob the Lodger, which is not his name. He was not exactly easy to deal with for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which was that he tended to have a lot of extremely fixed ideas. One of these ideas he had was that it was impossible for a cat to be intelligent (because he didn't especially like cats). In his mind, dogs could, but not cats. So when I kept telling him how bright Minsky was, he thought I was just imagining things, because he could be rather patronising like that. However, unfortunately for him, he voiced his opinions about cats in front of Minsky.

So Minsky decided he would show this silly human. One day, Bob the Lodger parked his car outside my house and was walking to the gate when Minsky spotted him. He ran into his path and angled his head as if to say "follow me, human"; and Bob thought grandly, "Ah, the cat wishes me to follow it. I shall humour it!" So he followed, and Minsky led him up a narrow lane between two rows of back gardens. In one of these gardens, there was a dog.

Minsky positioned himself where the dog could see him, so of course it set about barking frantically. Minsky then calmly moved along to the garden diagonally opposite, where there was another dog, and did the same thing. Next, he moved into the middle of the path where both dogs could see him (and therefore also each other), paused for a moment... and then shot off back to the entry to the lane, leaving these two dogs barking at each other like mad. Cats can't actually smirk, but Minsky apparently managed to give that impression; certainly he looked up at Bob as if to say, "See? I did that."

Bob was flabbergasted. He came in and told me the whole story. "I take it all back," he said. "That cat did forward planning!"

"I did tell you," I replied.

Cats can't laugh, either, but I'm quite sure Minsky was off somewhere doing whatever they do instead.