Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night, 2004

Edinburgh, Scotland

The night was cold, wet, windy and a little foggy, but this year for Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night, Yves, Gav (our friend from across the road) and I decided to brave the weather and go up to the top of Calton Hill to watch the fireworks at Meadowbank Stadium.

The show wasn't too bad, although we missed the start because it took longer to walk there than expected, but I suspect it would have been better if we could have seen over the tops of the trees which were directly in the way. The fog didn't help much either. On the other hand, after the show there were some people letting off fireworks directly above our heads on Calton Hill — needless to say we saw those ones quite well! We also got a great view of the whole city and there seemed to be one or two fireworks going off all over the place every few minutes. Cool!

Once we were thoroughly frozen we decided to jump on a bus and head home for a bonfire and BBQ on the grassy area behind our building. The ground was quite wet and there were autumn leaves everywhere so we brought down some chairs and little tables from the flat to make things a bit more comfortable. It was pretty cool because for most of the night we could see fireworks going off every few seconds and there were quite a lot going off just behind our building!

After the BBQ we got a bonfire happening in our barbipot and when we got a good fire happening we decided to sacrifice the jack-o-lantern that I had made for Halloween on the previous weekend. It took a while to burn, contrary to our expectations, but it did give off some really cool effects once the fire started to blaze inside the pumpkin. Yves stuffed the top of it with wet leaves which let off a lot of smoke and then it started to rain quite a lot, so we didn't get any good shots of the pumpkin on fire. Oh well, it was fun anyway!