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Frequently, on street corners in the towns and around places where alcohol flows and brain cells degenerate, you can hear individuals pontificate on the state of the nation. Usually, concluding in their infinite wisdom that the best thing to do to resolve their issues about which they feel so passionately, is to blow up the government and start again.

Well, around this time of year, young children who have little knowledge of history and some of their parents who care less, collect wood and brush, stack it in the back garden and set fire to it. Often with an effigy of a human being on the top of it. They will explode various expensive devices - fireworks - shoot rockets into the sky and eat copious amounts of overdone barbecued intensively farmed animals. Some of their adult guests will drink unusual quantities of beer and wine, in preparation for the drive home afterward.

Guy Fawkes night. Bonfire night. For those of you unfamiliar with the eccentric English tradition, let me share some insight with you.

The infamous "Gunpowder Plot" to blow up the Houses of parliament took place in 1605. The idea was to wipe out in one go the Protestant King James and as many of his aristocratic contemporaries as possible, incite a rebellion across the land and install another regime more suited to the aspirations of the rebels. Why? Well James and his lot were all Protestants and the rebels wanted Catholicism to hold sway, or at least have a freer hand in matters, or some such ethos.

Guy Fawkes was the man who knew most about explosives, was passionate enough to take the risk to set it off from a cellar under the assembly and was discovered just in time by the Guard on November 5th, matches in hand so to speak.

He was to be hung drawn and quartered in St.Paul's Churchyard of all places, but leaped from the scaffold breaking his neck, thus avoiding a painful afternoon in front of baying peasants with nothing better to do.

The resulting Act of Parliament called for "a joyful day of deliverance" to be celebrated in the streets of London and anywhere else where alcohol flowed and brain cells degenerated. The act lasted until 1859, but as these things were too good to do without, we continued setting fire to heaps of garden rubbish, getting drunk and exploding gunpowder often with no regard for why.

I wonder if anything is new or strange about this?

If religious fanatics were to try and blow up another group today, just because they didn't agree with them, would we pass an act of parliament to celebrate the occasion? Perhaps we would think it intolerable that such intolerance existed? So many have been killed around the world for disagreeing on something nobody has proved conclusively one way or the other.

I believe that your religious philosophies are yours to treasure. I keep my views private and I am happy to not discriminate against another's beliefs nor will I try to sway you to a political ideal. But yet as I write, some group somewhere is following in Guy Fawkes footsteps. Equally justly - in their hearts and minds - and also with the inevitable result of destruction, and a continuation of unhappiness. Will we ever reach a balance where we agree to differ?

While you ponder on that I'm going down to the store to get my fireworks, and then I'm going to pile up that brushwood I've been promising to burn. And where is the charcoal for that barbecue . . . . ?

Learn more about this author, David Winner.
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