Gandalf's fireworks
Last night was the Taruithorn bonfire and Gandalf's fireworks. The moon was out, the night was clear, and teh_elb and I set out from Magdalen Bridge around six with torches and bike lights through the dark towards the river. It was, I said at the time, my kind of adventure - there was darkness, and there was moonlight, and there were whispering rustles in the bushes, and light chirrupings from the undergrowth, but there was also a nice lighted row of pretty tealights in jars to light the way home. When we emerged from the trees, there was a bonfire, boxes of fireworks, a lot of food of the cake variety and the chuck-it-in-till-it-chars variety, and people, and a smoothly unruffled fork in the river to reflect back the flames. It was delightful.
The highlight, I think, was undoubtedly this:
Those are motion smears of flame - it was a fire staff lit on both ends.
Picture courtesy footnotetoplato, thank you. (Er... that is me in the circles of flame. I appreciate it's a little hard to be sure.) But anyway, that was amazingly fun, and I was surprisingly adept at it considering I have no hand-eye coordination. It's a very hindbrain activity, I suspect - you don't know how to spin a staff around your body and head, you just... do it. And when you're aware of the flames both intellectually and as passing stars around your ears, it gets a little more primal. I am always complaining I have no hobbies. I am overwhelmingly tempted to take up fire-spinning. Possibly my landlord wouldn't like it. But nevertheless.
Shortly after I finally set it down and went back to the bonfire, someone else had a go, and did a quite magnificent series of spins that were marred somewhat by his dropping the staff, watching it roll over and over as if choreographed and splash inevitably into the water. Cue the entire party rushing hysterically to the water's edge and making increasingly inept suggestions as to how to get it out again. At length the staff's hapless owner plunged in after it (the water is four feet deep at this point) armed with torch and indomitable sense of humour. ("How cold are you getting?" I asked after a while, meaning, are you going to be dragged out of there with pneumonia, and he said, thoughtfully, "It's not so bad when you're in. But I wish there weren't water in my crotch.")
He did not, in the end, find it, probably because osymandias had nearly dropped a log on him, and retired to the fireside to steam gently from the trousers for the rest of the evening.
Other things of note:
-Food. I really, really like food. And mulled wine, and mulled apple juice (which is apple juice with cinnamon and ginger), and squishy Mars Bar sqaures (foreverdirt and I shared the last one, which squished delightfully), and what looked like cakes with tomato slices on but were actually pizza bits with tomato sqaures on, chocolate-chilli brownies, and marshmallows toasted into oblivion on the ends of dead sparklers. And then potatoes roasted in the embers, and sausages crisped on the outside. Taruithorn always makes me feel like I'm living in an Enid Blyton novel.
-Given that there is wine involved, and also several hours outside in the dark, and we were a few miles from the nearest facilities, the general consensus that occasionally people would strike out into the undergrowth, and other people would not notice that they did. In a lull between fireworks, I rustled my way through the trees with a torch and out of the dark someone shouted, "Person! Person who needs the toilet! Don't worry, I'm five metres to your right!"
See, now that is civilised.
-As the night wore on, teh_elb and I had a very interesting discussion about the provenance of the gospels, which is not something I know anything about, and then about religion more generally - why it is interesting, and why it's so difficult to extricate it from your identity. I thought at the time that I would like to be keeping better track of what we were talking about, because it was interesting, but in hindsight it was the good kind of campfire conversation, interesting and occasionally profound, but with no pressure to be so.
(Also, at one point I went in search of Elb in the trees on the way to the road, having not seen her for a while, and when she appeared, she noted with some bemusement that she had just discovered a belly-dancer's outfit hanging off a tree.
...no one has been able to shed any light on this mystery. It hangs there still, beaded and baffling.)
-Fireworks! There were some of the ones that shriek, and some of the ones that fountain gently green, and some that explode into stars, but by far the most diverting were the Catherine wheels. Three in a row swooshed red, green and white before escaping into the trees to consternation. Someone, I forget who, noted how lucky we are that we do this in damp old England - if we'd been doing it in, say, Australia, we'd have probably set fire to the whole county.
-Also, I had a proposal of marriage from foreverdirt; both jacinthsong and shimgray are very upset about it; I am unrepentant.
About one in the morning, we got to clearing up, gathering up spent fireworks and rubbish and whatnot, and about half past one Shim and I were heading home through the fields. It was a beautiful evening - I love nights like this, when I don't have to worry about not knowing anyone, because I know everyone. It has been a Taruithorn sort of weekend, as well - on Friday night there was a trial for Bilbo and Thorin Oakenshield on charges of assault, theft, trespass, aiding and abetting, murder and genocide, with many witnesses and costumes and learned friends, with yours truly as junior counsel for the prosecution. I actually had fear about this beforehand - because while I am a toddler lawyer I am a toddler lawyer, and everyone in the room was friendly but there were still fifty of them, and yes it was all ficitional really, but, well, I have not stood up in front of a whole room full of people and prosecuted a case before. But it went well. It went well, and I was pleased.
It wasn't far from the river, but we got home stupidly late last night and woke up very late this morning in a tangle of clothes and sheets and boots smelling of woodsmoke, and now I need to do two loads of washing and get the mud out of the carpet, but I'm happy, I really am.
The highlight, I think, was undoubtedly this:
Those are motion smears of flame - it was a fire staff lit on both ends.
Picture courtesy footnotetoplato, thank you. (Er... that is me in the circles of flame. I appreciate it's a little hard to be sure.) But anyway, that was amazingly fun, and I was surprisingly adept at it considering I have no hand-eye coordination. It's a very hindbrain activity, I suspect - you don't know how to spin a staff around your body and head, you just... do it. And when you're aware of the flames both intellectually and as passing stars around your ears, it gets a little more primal. I am always complaining I have no hobbies. I am overwhelmingly tempted to take up fire-spinning. Possibly my landlord wouldn't like it. But nevertheless.
Shortly after I finally set it down and went back to the bonfire, someone else had a go, and did a quite magnificent series of spins that were marred somewhat by his dropping the staff, watching it roll over and over as if choreographed and splash inevitably into the water. Cue the entire party rushing hysterically to the water's edge and making increasingly inept suggestions as to how to get it out again. At length the staff's hapless owner plunged in after it (the water is four feet deep at this point) armed with torch and indomitable sense of humour. ("How cold are you getting?" I asked after a while, meaning, are you going to be dragged out of there with pneumonia, and he said, thoughtfully, "It's not so bad when you're in. But I wish there weren't water in my crotch.")
He did not, in the end, find it, probably because osymandias had nearly dropped a log on him, and retired to the fireside to steam gently from the trousers for the rest of the evening.
Other things of note:
-Food. I really, really like food. And mulled wine, and mulled apple juice (which is apple juice with cinnamon and ginger), and squishy Mars Bar sqaures (foreverdirt and I shared the last one, which squished delightfully), and what looked like cakes with tomato slices on but were actually pizza bits with tomato sqaures on, chocolate-chilli brownies, and marshmallows toasted into oblivion on the ends of dead sparklers. And then potatoes roasted in the embers, and sausages crisped on the outside. Taruithorn always makes me feel like I'm living in an Enid Blyton novel.
-Given that there is wine involved, and also several hours outside in the dark, and we were a few miles from the nearest facilities, the general consensus that occasionally people would strike out into the undergrowth, and other people would not notice that they did. In a lull between fireworks, I rustled my way through the trees with a torch and out of the dark someone shouted, "Person! Person who needs the toilet! Don't worry, I'm five metres to your right!"
See, now that is civilised.
-As the night wore on, teh_elb and I had a very interesting discussion about the provenance of the gospels, which is not something I know anything about, and then about religion more generally - why it is interesting, and why it's so difficult to extricate it from your identity. I thought at the time that I would like to be keeping better track of what we were talking about, because it was interesting, but in hindsight it was the good kind of campfire conversation, interesting and occasionally profound, but with no pressure to be so.
(Also, at one point I went in search of Elb in the trees on the way to the road, having not seen her for a while, and when she appeared, she noted with some bemusement that she had just discovered a belly-dancer's outfit hanging off a tree.
...no one has been able to shed any light on this mystery. It hangs there still, beaded and baffling.)
-Fireworks! There were some of the ones that shriek, and some of the ones that fountain gently green, and some that explode into stars, but by far the most diverting were the Catherine wheels. Three in a row swooshed red, green and white before escaping into the trees to consternation. Someone, I forget who, noted how lucky we are that we do this in damp old England - if we'd been doing it in, say, Australia, we'd have probably set fire to the whole county.
-Also, I had a proposal of marriage from foreverdirt; both jacinthsong and shimgray are very upset about it; I am unrepentant.
About one in the morning, we got to clearing up, gathering up spent fireworks and rubbish and whatnot, and about half past one Shim and I were heading home through the fields. It was a beautiful evening - I love nights like this, when I don't have to worry about not knowing anyone, because I know everyone. It has been a Taruithorn sort of weekend, as well - on Friday night there was a trial for Bilbo and Thorin Oakenshield on charges of assault, theft, trespass, aiding and abetting, murder and genocide, with many witnesses and costumes and learned friends, with yours truly as junior counsel for the prosecution. I actually had fear about this beforehand - because while I am a toddler lawyer I am a toddler lawyer, and everyone in the room was friendly but there were still fifty of them, and yes it was all ficitional really, but, well, I have not stood up in front of a whole room full of people and prosecuted a case before. But it went well. It went well, and I was pleased.
It wasn't far from the river, but we got home stupidly late last night and woke up very late this morning in a tangle of clothes and sheets and boots smelling of woodsmoke, and now I need to do two loads of washing and get the mud out of the carpet, but I'm happy, I really am.