this looks like haze and grey cloudy days. fog some mornings. maybe frost.
but it’s damp now. the dampness rises from the ground and it would have been a steamy dampness had the heat been trapped in england’s atmosphere. but it isn’t. england is cold. you would not know the belly of the earth is molten lava, you would suppose the ground was cold, and coldness rises from the ground, but really…
really the cold that england enshrouds herself in comes from space.
comes from her perpetually facing towards the inky blackness of the universe in this season of her circumvention around the sun.
towards the cold harshness of the world beyond this world, absent from the warmth of the burning star that is the sun.
So November starts with fireworks. She knows she has a lot of work to do, dragging the unwilling folk through GMT, when they are suddenly thrust into early sunsets, and a black night, so unlike the perpetual twilight of summer nights.
I thought about writing about two different things for today’s post. I couldn’t choose between the two.
Do I go for something mundane. Little. A passing thought. Twittering leaf. Sparrow in the bush.
Or do I go for something … else.
I think about writing about both, twining them around each other, like a ribbon and a gnarled twig from an ancient oak tree.
It’s the fifth of November, which means in the United Kingdom – most people take part in a tradition whereby they pretend they are burning a man alive on a bonfire. They pile logs and wood and pallets to make a mountain, and set a chair on the top of it. Some put a stuffed fella on it, but most these days don’t. Then they proceed to set it ablaze, and stand before its vicious, fiery heat, and watch him burn.
Remember remember, the fifth of November….
Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament, and parliament will never let anybody forget it – the bonfire is a reminder and a warning.
Barbaric, no?
You want some benefit of doubt? It’s been an old tradition to throw straw humans on bonfires – to ward off evil spirits, so I expect that is why there is a tradition of burning a Guy on the bonfire. But it still reeks of something barbaric.
Barbaric because we are a nation who loves to point our CIVILISED fingers at the world we colonised and devastated, accusing everybody else of barbarism and terrorism, dividing lands we never owned, conquering places and causing chaos and destruction wherever our great empire reigned.
We fire fireworks on Bonfire Night and cheer and whoop to the music, we burn guys and eat our fish and chips, while babies cower under the sounds of relentless bombs. We sigh and lean back in our velvet chairs, and lament the chaotic situation of savages – never mind we caused all this pain in the first place.
Ah.
England.
Great nation of non barbaric, civilised peoples.
Watching the world burn on our thrones of self satisfaction.
Money in our pockets.
Money on ethnically cleansed lands.
Our great nation has managed to to dehumanise the men whose lands they colonised entirely, painting them as barbaric terrorists, yet it is these same men who are pulling their children, over five thousand of them, out of the rubble with bare hands, and comforting them with devastatingly beautiful language.
I watched the fireworks, along with my great fellow countrymen.
And I thought, who gave us the right to pillage lands that did not belong to us, paint its people as uncivilised, and sit on their treasures. Who is uncivilised, really?
The other thing I wanted to post about was that I got free sofas on an instagram giveaway.
Ocean Bream 