Follow the firework code...

Every October and early November, when I was growing up in Britain, everywhere you looked there were posters of disfigured children.

On TV those same chilling images were accompanied by stories of ruined lives and an exhortation that unless you “followed the firework code” it was a racing certainty that you would join them.

Time was, you see, that in every British household on November 5th, a bonfire would be built, with an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top and, as darkness set in, the bonfire would be set alight and as Fawkes went up in flames dad would light fireworks, and somehow, shortly afterwards, children all over the country would arrive at the casualty department of local hospitals with horrific burns and injuries that would forever blight their lives.

Full detail on Mr. Fawkes requires a level of historical reading that I'm not prepared to offer right here but suffice to say it involves religion, evil rulers, insurrection and to a lesser extent, democracy in seventeenth century England.

Anyway, today, most British childrens' experience of fireworks is at organised displays where they're kept tens of metres away from the action, so that they can 'ooh' and 'aah' in parent-approved safety.

Here, of course, things are a little different.

In front of Serbia's parliament building, as midnight struck on New Year's Eve, and the official fireworks lit up the sky, from the depths of a thousand pockets, came firecrackers and rockets, prompting my wife to institute counter measures. - small child off father's shoulders, hoods up, seek space, surround small child to ensure that only parents and teenagers suffer blast injuries, remain vigilant.  Of course, by the time we had done our best to comply with these instructions, most of the fireworks were just a smoky memory and those that remained were not visible to a knee high youngster.

Perhaps fireworks these days contain less 'fire' or less 'work' or perhaps Serbians are made of sterner stuff than us Brits or maybe I wasn't maintaining efficient journalistic awareness but whatever the reason, I didn't detect a single blood-curdling scream, and the emergency services failed to arrive with lights flashing to cart the injured off to the burns unit.

I asked some of the guys in the office about this phenomenon, and was met with largely blank, uncomprehending looks. “Well, I suppose if you were stupid with one,” said one...” and “Really?” said another and “Well the firecrackers have been annoying me this year,” said our editor in Macedonia, but no one, not one, had a story, or hearsay, or even a half remembered apocryphal warning from their childhood relating to the dangers of fireworks.

Next year, I'm buying my rockets early.