Britainology 49: Guy Fawkes Night

It’s very much still a thing in New Zealand even though it’s just an excuse to buy fireworks that are otherwise illegal the rest of the year. It’s been very hard to try and explain this to my TESOL students in a way that isn’t “it’s a holiday about killing Catholics that generally distresses animals children, autistic people and people with PTSD.” Also I just remembered that when I was 7 my dad got shot in the head with a firework but he was fine because he was wearing the most stereotypical outback hat and he has British Dad pattern hair loss.

Can confirm that some Zimbabweans (at least around Harare in the early 00's) do celebrate Guy Fawkes / Bonfire Night. Though it's basically just treated as an excuse to congregate on a big field, drink, barbeque, and set off fireworks to the accompaniment of 90's Pop and various Dad Rock staples. My Dad was a sound technician / radio DJ and every year he'd get roped into running the sound system for my middle-schools Bonfire Night. It kind of had the atmosphere of a carnival minus the games, but plus explosives. So kind of 4th of July-ish I guess?

The wild thing is the U.S. drinking age was 18 until 1984.

Benedict Arnold was actually pretty based

I enjoyed the last little bit about family units and street communities as if they’re an extinct phenomenon; huge families living within shouting distance of each other is still very common in the northeast. I was born in the late 90s but I was one of the youngest of 30 children from one generation of my family, my dad’s siblings lived in the houses on either side of us and any gathering spanned a minimum of two gardens, if not also several houses and the front street. It’s standard to just pass children and pets over the garden fences for babysitting, and if we went to visit my grandma’s siblings for semi-regular parties, you were probably looking at a hundred people coming and going. I grew up babysitting my cousins kids and despite being ordinary-looking, I still sometimes get identified by strangers who will tell me “eeee you look the spit of” X relative who I haven’t seen in a decade. Even having moved out; I’m only ten minutes walk away from three family homes and an assortment of retired tradesmen who share a tenuous familial relationship and owe me favours for babysitting their grandkids.

The penny for the guy was to pay for fireworks

Another example of British royals being like “ho ho what a scamp you are, let’s be chums” is Colonel Thomas Blood, who was caught trying to nick the Crown Jewels & became a favourite of Charles II, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Blood

I went to the Lewis bonfire night once when I was living in London, it was absolutely buck wild.

FWIW, we’ve a fair idea of what English speakers at the time of Henry VIII would have sounded like, based on the evidence of contemporary writers, words in poetry written at the time that were obviously meant to rhyme but don’t anymore, etc. There’s even productions of Shakespeare plays in Original Pronunciation. The English language scholar David Crystal has made some programmes about it, e.g., https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s TL;DW it sounds to me like a West Country accent with some Irish and American thrown in

What patreon tier is northern-ireland-ology?

Ah yes, the glory of the priest hole and the "prostate-inism" inspection

In 18thC and 19thC England, the night was notoriously a night of popular discontent. Unpopular factory owners, landlords, or magistrates, might be beaten, pushed into rivers, or otherwise have their lives endangered. Which is what Allen Moore was building on in 'V for Vendetta'. Fireworks Night was thing in Australia when i was a kid in the 90s. The few i went to were in a Catholic churchyard, presided over by Irish parish priest. So i suspect the holiday was not overly sectarian. Oh, and Kemp is an Anglo Saxon name. It means "champion".

bonfires in NI are on the 12th of July which is the Battle of the Boyne/the day when Protestants really get nutty with it. If you’ve seen the episode of Derry Girls where they’re trying to get out of Derry and go to Donegal that’s what’s going on lmao.

Having a massive para-social moment when Milo mentioned Tromsø.

*handshake meme* seattle and London having endless grey,rain and 4pm sunsets

Enjoy bunnings diarrhoea!

lol we have guy fawkes celebrations in NZ, god knows why

FFS Milo, the tudors didn’t have turkey, somewhere in the distance Eleanor Janega is screaming into the void

The Talmud you're referencing is Berakhot 62a. "This is Torah and I must learn" is my favorite thing. "Whaaaaaaaaaa? I thought this is what you WANTED! How am I meant to learn the Torah of fucking your wife if I never see how it's done?" "Wait, wot?"

New Zealand celebrates Guy Fawkes - we have plenty of vestigial Britishness left in us. Which is exactly why you guys should come and do a Britainology over here!

It's celebrated in nz

I did not have the opportunity to attend a Guy Fawkes Night until I was an adult who had been thoroughly enculturated in the colonies. There were some logistical problems at the venue and the MC kept shining us on instead of simply saying, "Look, we've got people in the queue waiting to get in." After several instances of this I booed the MC and immediately regretted it because I expected an American crowd response instead of an English one. (To be brief, you Respect The Institutions in benighted Columbia.) Instead of what I feared, some other people in the crowd joined me in booing, and did it of their own volition the next time the MC shined us on. The notion I took away from this evening was "what a country!", one I have been quite disabused of subsequently.

Big southern bias here- as an American who moved to Salford in 2017 I was baffled by the vaguely threatening, definitely working class children who told me to fuck off when I didn't give them anything after they screamed PENNY FOR GUY at me outside lidl.

Blowing up parliament (good), being Catholic (bad).

Guy Fawkes? More like Guy Fucks imo

Sometimes I forget that Nate is Jewish but then he throws in a reference to a Mel Brooks movie and I am instantly reminded