Seeing as it's officially Bonfire night (even though all the firework displays were last night) this evening I thought I'd share my favourite fireworks story.

It happened in 1998 when I was still working for a management consultancy firm in Bristol. We had a nice little social circle going in those days and come Bonfire night we'd all decided to go to Rupes' house in Portishead where all the houses in the street sort of clubbed together for the kids and had a largish display.

For those that don't know where Portishead is (and yes, that's where the band are from) it's a small town west of Bristol on the Severn Channel. It's built up the side of the hill so Rupes' house overlooked the channel - one of the busiest shipping lanes in the UK. The usual saying was that if you could see Wales across the channel then it was raining, if you couldn't then it was about to rain :)

Some of Rupes' neighbours were doing the bonfire and the girlie fireworks (like Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles), Rupes was providing food and beer and Normy and I (the two young guys in the group) were detailed with buying some big rockets. Oh yes. :)

So we headed into town to the big firework shop and bought a pack of 4 biggish rockets made in England for twenty quid and two huge mofo's (one from Germany and one from China) that came with six foot launching sticks and were twenty quid each. Looking more like artillery than fireworks they were quickly christened 'Adolf' and 'Chairman Mao'. Then Normy and I got an invite to a student party by a couple of first years I was seeing at the time. Hmmmm. Lots of fit eighteen year olds or blowing things up? Tough one.

We decided to blow things up and then drive back to Bristol and drink with lots of eighteen year olds :)

We got over to Portishead about 8 in time for a couple of beers and to watch the bonfire and the rubbish fireworks before it was our turn. We decided to launch the small rockets first - reading on the packet that you should be at least 10 metres away after lighting the fuse. This simply wasn't possible in Rupes' garden (as it was long but thin) so we simply hid behind a small wall on his patio after lighting them. They were pretty impressive really - lots of colours and a big round explosion - they certainly wouldn't have been disgraced in a proper display. So we were really looking forward to Adolf and Chairman Mao as they were 4 times the size :)

We flipped a coin and Normy won and chose to light Adolf first. The fuse burnt much quicker than he expected (and we were supposed to be 20 metres away from these ones) so he came back over the patio wall horizontally as it took off almost immediately (something we both found highly amusing for some reason). Adolf took off in a trail of sparks that could've graced the space shuttle (to many a traditional 'ooooooooh') for several seconds before the sparks gave out. Several seconds more and nothing - we were starting to think it might've been a dud before *Whoooomph!* someone detonated a small nuclear weapon above Portishead. This thing must've been surplus military ordnance. It was great :)

So then it's my turn to launch Chairman Mao. Luckily for me I didn't have to dive for cover this time but it was still impressive as it went up. As with Adolf the sparks died out and we waited with bated breath for another huge explosion. Nothing. We waited some more. Still nothing. A few groans from the kids in the other garden. We scanned the sky (noticing an oil tanker passing directly in front of us) but still nothing.

Then, below us on the beach something blew up. Something big, red and fireworky blew up. Something, in fact our firework, blew up on the beach about 100 yards from an oil tanker. We jumped into a couple of cars and drove down the hill to see if we'd hit anyone, but luckily for us we hit a golf course just in front of the beach and no-one was on it at the time!

And the next year we were there playin golf and our crater was a new bunker :)

So fireworks - not just for fun, can be used for construction too.