A Better Bonfire

For the last couple of years we've attended Bonfire celebrations at first Godalming and then Guildford which, you may remember, turned out to be intimidatingly and in fact tediously massive. This year, as threatened, we decided to try one of the local villages for something a bit more communitarian and low-key. Chiddingfold was recommended: apparently the whole village is closed to traffic for the occasion and buses convey revellers from Witley Station some distance away, so that we thought would probably not be what we wanted. Puttenham's Firework Night cost £10 a head which we considered cheeky. Instead we thought we'd try Hascombe, which is tiny and inhabited by almost nobody.

That may be the case, but by the time we arrived about twenty minutes before the fireworks were due to start (we thought we could live without the children's procession to light the bonfire) the whole mile or so of road through the village was lined with cars, and more people picking their way through the dark with torches. We eventually found a place right at the south end of the village and joined those still making the journey to the field outside the Village Hall. The somewhat inadequate photos here don't give much of an idea of the scale - the bonfire is an impressive pile and there were probably between 700 and 1000 people there, milling around in front of the Hall and a couple of food and drink tents erected for the occasion. It was just about acceptable, we thought - we were able to linger on the edge and not get crushed with people, the fireworks were every bit as good as at the larger shows, and there was no inane commentary from a local radio DJ. 

Lots of children were wearing multi-coloured flashing-light rabbit ears, which I can't recall seeing before. It leads me to reflect yet again how big the Bonfire season is now, compared to what I remember from my childhood forty years ago; Hascombe's celebration is modest compared to those around it (that's why we went), but still a pretty large business.