Day 124 - Fireworks

 FIREWORKS

Prompt - Fireworks : Do they inspire you or do you not like the noise and commotion.  Write about it.

2020 was a good year for the dogs of central Edinburgh.  This has become, over the past couple of decades, a city of fireworks.  We have fireworks for, it seems, almost everything.  Not just bonfire night and the celebration of bringing in the new year.  Not just the big fireworks with music synchronised concert/display that marks the end of the madness of the main festival period in August.  But every night in August, sometimes more than once in an evening, and for other celebrations or commemorations of greater or lesser import across the year.  Fireworks are a matter of routine if you live in Edinburgh.

There are minor displays in all parts of the city at differing times.  Out flat faces away from the centre, yet as midnight hits and January the first begins we can always see at least three sets of fireworks going off.  Not the back garden sort, but proper professional series of explosions and light and colour.  Far enough away for us to take in the benefits of the sight without the concomitant loudness of sound.  Our cat remains undisturbed throughout.

She would not be if we were within a few hundred meters of the Castle Rock.  That is the centre point for all the most impressive, brightest, longest lasting, and noisiest displays.  No fun for the dogs and other pets, and humans of an aurally sensitive nature, who are nearby.  And last year, and this so far, provided some respite from that.  There were fireworks to mark 2021 arriving, but there has been little else in the past twelve months.  It won't last.  Edinburgh loves its light and sound displays.

And me, what do I feel about this artistic use of gunpowder?  I recall my father setting off catherine wheels and jumping jacks and the rockets from a milk bottle that fizzed and plopped to real effect, eacht fifth of November.  There might have been a few more impressive rockets around us, but I recall being impressed by his efforts, my younger self enjoying the minor sensation of power that waving a sparkler stick in the air provided for a few seconds.  But after that fireworks became a take it or leave it experience.  If there was a display conveniently on hand I would watch, but I wouldn't go out of my way.  The exceptions came in my forties, when we'd sometimes go to the see the national firework championships, held over three nights by the seafront in the town where we lived.   It was within walking distance of home, so why not?  They were lengthy displays, choreographed by the fireworks manufacturers themselves, to accompany their chosen pieces of music.  Good to watch, and even listen to for the synchronicity, as long as the weather was decent enough.

Then we moved to Edinburgh.  Thirty five years before, when I'd left, fireworks were a small scale affair.  I returned to a metropolis where spectacular aerial vistas were almost a commonplace.  In the first couple of years we'd make a point of joining the throngs in the vicinity of princes Street to watch the end of festival show.  If we were in town during August, and in a suitable viewing point when the fun began, we'd stop and watch.  But watch too many and they all blend into a oneness.  It's easy to become blase about something that might be a source of joy to begin with, but the experience of which palls due to repetition.  

I like a good fireworks display.  Perhaps, after a year near enough without, I will enjoy them more when they brighten out skyline later this year (although, at time of writing, it's by no means certain what form our festival month will take, but to imagine it without fireworks almost seem like blasphemy!).  But in August 2022?  I'll be back in take it or leave it mode, and feeling sorry for those dogs.