In the new spirit of reconciliation and freedom from history ...

... between the English and the Irish ...

... may I make the polite request that those who would have historically considered themselves most ineffably opposed to the English anti-Catholicism with which it unfortunately became mixed up (Sinn Fein voters, Celtic fans - come on, it's not as if anyone else will be able to win the SPL for the foreseeable future) - make a conscious effort to reclaim the tradition of autumn bonfires?  They are, after all, part of their own tradition, part of the Celtic pagan inheritance.  They got mixed up with the Protestant revolution and all the unnecessary hatred and bloodshed, lasting well into my own lifetime, that resulted, and they were (unforgivably, and almost certainly hastening their decline in England) misused by certain Mail or Express-reading types to suggest that all Irish people were potential terrorists.  But that does not change their origins, nor does it change their immense potency and power, their evocation of things beyond normal human understanding, their sense of - ultimately - life and death.

More to the point, it has become necessary to champion them simply as a means of detracting from the imposition of American-led commercialism on the process of the seasons for all of us in both the islands, and of undermining the ludicrous pretence of some in Ireland (who really, really should know better) that a victory for US big business is in some sense a victory for them (when in fact those commercial forces menace the autumn traditions of Ireland just as much as they do those of England, and for very much the same reasons and with - thus far - seemingly as little serious resistance). Autumn bonfires were a means of marking the change of seasons centuries before the Gunpowder Plot.  They can and should be so again.  The divisions and hatreds that have turned families and brothers against each other for centuries - and thus the inability, until now, to create a unified front for all the peoples of the two islands against the forces of exploitation and degradation - have been a significant factor in the forces of global commerce laying waste to the traditions of all parts of the two islands, and exploiting the arguments of the left (which it would not otherwise care about one iota) to present them as "racist" or "backward" (when what it really means is that it cannot make enough money out of them).  Now that those old hatreds are seemingly - finally - dissipating and being recognised as impositions and restrictions which hold us all back in a way that can no longer be afforded, could this also be a moment for the English and the Irish to come together in favour of autumn bonfires, for whichever reason you want them and whoever or whatever you want to commemorate or not, as against the Americanised version of the festival which the Irish and Scots once thought was theirs?  That festival and autumn bonfires share the same origins.  It is time to use the reconciliations of 2011 and 2012 in both parts of Ireland to bring them together again.

Samhain reviewing thoughts

I didn't say enough about Lost Hearts last Christmas - the song itself predated the TV adaptation, but I wonder whether "The Musical Box" by Genesis was influenced by a misremembering / creative misinterpretation of the original story? It's still the apotheosis of a certain sort of prog Englishness, next to which everything that came after (and it has never really ceased to exist, ever more irrelevant and pointless with time) seems shrivelled and that many more generations removed from the source. It's vicious, not a hint of stultifying whimsy. It's that much closer to the source. Gabriel knew both the idylls and the evils, or at least their last knockings. He also knew Lost Hearts, I'm sure.

And that last scene of all, as the children set free from Mr Abney's evil dance off into some parallel world, some time alongside our own where they will never grow old as the rest of us grow old ... that must have influenced Cresswell and/or Cant because it's too proto-Moondial for words (and that has never seemed more resonant and voluminous, never more capable of making you believe that there is that other time, somewhere: I hope, like nothing else, that I am still here to rewatch it when it's as old as Quatermass is now and even beyond, because the first things that really change your life are the ones you have with you in your last hours).

When only one element is ever allowed to interfere with the market ...

... you get an inherent unfairness, and it usually tends to favour whatever is supported by the market-fundamentalist Right and their well-meaning, unconscious allies on the Left.

If anything is allowed to interfere with the market today it is usually the criteria of Health and Safety, undoubtedly the only factors which actually have more power to interfere with the market than they did before Momus's "accident" of 30 years ago. As with "political correctness", the above phrase has of course been misused so often by all the wrong people that it has effectively become devoid of all meaning, and I would be the last person in the world to condemn the very real increases in public safety it has led to. But when it is the only non-commercial factor allowed to affect British life, deep inconsistencies come into play, and a case in point is the restriction on the sale of fireworks to two or three fixed periods in the year. I approve of this, for what little it is worth: restrictions may not have been needed when there actually still was a national culture that flowed subliminally and unselfconsciously (this isn't Mailism, in case anyone thinks it is), when 5th November was just one night which had an inherent, almost neo-feudal place in almost everyone's minds, but since the withering of that way of existence, and the coming of a near-universal cynicism about and disconnection from such rituals, such restrictions are necessary. If enough people are sufficiently alienated from the meaninglessness of their existence to throw fireworks around on any night of the year - and they are - you cannot allow them to be sold as freely as you could back when almost nobody would have dreamt of letting them off on any night but one (outside Scotland, New Year's Day was an ordinary working day until the 1970s) and so you didn't need restrictions.

But if the market can be bucked for things considered "dangerous" but not for anything else, you end up with an unfair competition. A case in point is that where I live the hard sell of Halloween (no apostrophe here: it doesn't deserve it) now begins on, at least, 14th September. In the context of the great battle for the turn of the seasons (bonfires at the beginning of winter go back to Samhain and predate Guy Fawkes by centuries, and continued in Ireland as part of the real Hallowe'en, facts which should be remembered and, indeed, remembered by those well-meaning soft-Leftists who decry the largely long-buried, outside a few well-publicised but essentially unrepresentative towns, "anti-Catholicism" and, as they have done so many times before, let naked commercialism through by default) such promotions should really be restricted to whenever it is - mid-October, from memory - that fireworks can be sold. It's only fair. Only then would you have what the unrestricted other than in special circumstances market is supposed to be provide but doesn't: the mythical level playing field. Only then could autumn perhaps become again the time of the year I most enjoyed, rather than the time I most dread.