"Anti-fireworks do-gooders may think they know better, but I urge them reconsider before restricting my traditions."
Life is scary, but there is no finer way to sneer at fear and sorrow than to light up the heavens with fireworks.
Others would rather cower in the darkness.
Anti-fireworks campaigners have already restricted sales.
Now it seems risk-averse killjoys intend to ban them, using every excuse - fire, injury, frightened animals and the inappropriateness of marking an old foreign plot - to impose their misanthropy on a joy of springtime.
None of the excuses wash.
In childhood, on a residential city fire station, long before safety was invented, Guy Fawkes was the best night of the year. Operationally it was a thoroughly predictable and therefore extremely valuable exercise against which to benchmark brigade capabilities annually. We kids were left in sole charge of the station bonfire while engines wailed off hither and yon, mothers disappeared with the auxiliary soup caravan and all adults returned merrily in the wee small hours well fortified by the hospitality of gratefully protected revellers.
Mind you, back then, fire-fighters actually entered burning buildings instead of waiting for random passers-by to save anyone trapped inside, just as mines rescue personnel once descended into the bowels of the earth to extract trapped comrades without a moment's insurance-savvy hesitation.
Yes fireworks can be dangerous. Isn't that the point?
Animal rights campaigners project personal neuroses on to selectively anthropomorphised domestic pets while simultaneously sponsoring mass slaughter of cute little lambs, tender calves and fine feathered chickens for dinner. To be really consistent, they'd need to lobby to save intestinal worms.
Guy Fawkes commemorations were ordered by Act of Parliament in 1605 to celebrate a foiled gunpowder plot. Like most of our anachronistic and seasonally topsy-turvy festivals, it was imported here with colonisation.
Seasonal celebrations are an instinctive human need. That we continue to hold ours in the wrong seasons on pretexts few of us respect underlines the fundamental irrelevance of whatever the reasoning. Festivals have been hijacked for expedient political, religious and commercial purposes since the dawn of time. It doesn't make them any less necessary.
Anti-fireworks do-gooders may think they know better, but I urge them reconsider before restricting my traditions.
For instance I abhor all competitive sport, religion and the stink over my garden when neighbours helicopter spray with herbicides. Barking dogs and double-barrelled logging trucks scare the living daylights out of me.
I find most commercial signage aesthetically offensive and the whine of the water-pump in the avocado orchard at the village on dry days makes my teeth scream.
However, I do not crusade to stop these irritants because I understand their (possibly misguided) proprietors are as entitled to their peculiar tastes and behaviours, as I am to mine.
Live and let live.
Positive campaigns for social change have increased freedoms by improving human rights.
However, those lobby groups that crusade negatively with emotive propaganda against objective phenomena - such as fireworks, fat, alcohol, open fires and tobacco - merely succeed in restricting our freedoms.
Calculated risk is an essential component of innovation.
The spurious notion that safety exists within prescribed boundaries robs people of initiative.
An illusory foolproof world, arguably a world full of fools, is far scarier than any backyard fireworks.
The worker logged 437 hours in five weeks - all of which was unpaid.