So I had my first Texas-style fourth of July this week. It was, I have to say, the loudest night-in I've ever experienced. Things got rolling just before sunset and finished up with a fusillade of what sounded suspiciously like small-arms fire around one in the morning. Thankfully nothing hit the house so all in all it was bearable enough.
It amazes me how dumb people can be though. I can't think *why* I should be amazed, but there you go. I suppose even now I find myself letting my expectations run a little too high when it comes to my fellow man. My next door neighbor, for example, who was wandering around, clearly somewhat drunk, with a beer glass in one hand a bottle-rocket in the other. His trick, I observed, was to light the bottle rocket, wait a second, and then throw it as hard as he could down the road. The rocket would usually ignite shortly after leaving his hand and hurtle down the street at or around head height. Just great. Oh, and he had a group of small children with him. Nice example, buddy.
I shalln't bother to labor the point. Drink and explosives. Not a great mix. There are plenty of people around the world with partial limbs and ruined faces who thought fireworks were toys, and I'll leave it at that.
So we bought a modest, nay, tiny, collection of bottle rockets and sparklers for my daughter's viewing enjoyment, but she pretty rapidly decided she didn't like the rockets (which were heavy on the noise and rather disappointing in the 'ooh, ahh' factor) and that the sparklers looked insanely dangerous (which, to be honest, they did.) What this meant was that she pretty quickly retreated back inside to watch everyone else's fireworks through the window, which muted the tooth-ache-inducing roar down to a gentle, kidney-compressing growl, and left me on my own outside launching disappointing rockets into an overcrowded night sky and having my bones in my inner-ear pounded into baking powder in the process.
Once the rockets were spent, which didn't take long, I decided to work through the rest of the sparklers so as not to waste them. This was actually kind of fun, as they came in different colors (amazing! You Americans think of the darndest things!) and let me draw pictures in the air with that 'retina burn' effect. Of course, my daughter requested 'flowers and hearts', mostly by shouting it through the window or around the edge of the door. So there I was, in the garden, waving my pink sparklers in the air, frantically drawing sparkly hearts while the rest of Harris County, Texas, blasted each other into oblivion with Saturn-5 sized monsters that probably could have caused a shift in the orbit of a small moon.
I doubt anyone could see me, thankfully. I mean, 'pink sparkly hearts' isn't exactly what I imagine Texan men hope to have as the end result of their July 4th celebrations. I'm English though, and man enough to stand up and sparkle for my kids.
It could explain all those gunshots later on though...
"He's around here somewhere, I knows it. Damn English, making fun of our July 4th with his 'pink hearts'"