Fireworks Strike!

It used to be Bonfire Night, now it seems it's more like Fireworks Week. A steady splattering of noise explosions, randomly fired in all directions by kids barely old enough to hold them. This year there were two gangs of shooters on both sides, so rather than hide on the boat, sitting targets, we went out to stroll the hood and see what was cooking.

Across the way it looked like there was a proper display going on in the park up the hill, so we trundled off up there only to find a few kids running around with lit rockets in their bare hands, so we abandoned that idea and headed back towards Kings Cross. On the other side of the bridge there seemed to be a relatively organised session of shooters and a handful of people watching along the bridge. Cars seem to have the biggest fright, driving along, not knowing where the next bang will come from, I'm amazed they don't swerve across the road.

We ended up in Kings Cross Place and bumped into one of Jam's friends and chatted about various things from the Eskimo throat music concert he was about to see to cycling across to Portugal for the Boom psychedelic music festival.

Such a relaxed place to hang out, we almost forgot it was Fireworks Week but finding remnants of burnt out rockets in our letterbox on our return home duly bought it all back down to earth. Glad to have survived day one of Fireworks Week relatively unscathed, we huddled down for a cracking good night's sleep.

Dressing Up

Last year Jam and I dressed up as a 'What is it' for Halloween. We were originally a bug of sorts. We'd cut two head-sized holes into a double duvet, dyed it black, although we didn't have quite enough dye and so it didn't take properly and came out a dirty grey, stitched straggly bits of black wool randomly onto it, attached some shiny black material to the lower half of it to represent our stomach, painted our faces blue for the eyes, had one arm hole each and wore black stripy tights – it was a frightful concoction and people were completely baffled and amused by it as we walked down the street and got on the tube.

'What is it?' we heard, a few too many times, and when someone plucked up the courage to ask us, we said in strange bug-like voices, 'We're a What-is-it!'

We were joined together, all night, at an all night party in our friends ubercool factory space, that they had done up with a web of string and ghoulish things hanging from it. They all nearly died of laughter when we turned up, which was the desired effect, sort of, well, we'd come to expect that after the tube journey and we had a fantastic night, although we had to get away from each other towards the end of the night, which entailed me running away to the graveyard crying, drunk, upset by something Jam had inadvertently said, meeting a stranger there who consoled me and told me I should go back and that everything would be all right and my partner would probably be worried and looking for me, which surely isn't meant to happen in a graveyard in the middle of the night when a man meets a distressed girl, half dressed, or rather half not dressed up, but it did happen like that and I went back, much to the relief of Jam and everyone else.

So this year, we thought we'd try something a bit more separable, but still on the together theme, seeing as though we'd been married since the last year's party. I wanted to go as a fly caught in a spider's web, with Jam being the spider. He thought we should go as 'Zomberina's' and borrow a friends all-in-one shiny suit and make skates out of foam to hang on our shoulders. Not a bad idea, although, borrowing the shiny Lycra suit on second thoughts would probably not have been so tasty! We had quite a lazy day on the Saturday and didn't manage to find any suitable dancer outfits, so we opted for the spider and fly outfit instead.

A fellow boater from the next mooring along had come down our way to paint his boat red, we know the chap quite well and offered him and his friends soup and cheesecake after he'd finished. He moored up alongside our boat and we all sat and ate soup and cheesecake as dusk began to fall. We told them of our outfit dilemmas and ran through our final choice, Jules said it was all about the eyes and we needed to make big bug eyes. Time was also of the essence and I pulled out a pair of green glasses which he then proceeded to draw gold honeycomb patterns on to create the bug eyes.

It worked a treat. I dressed all in green, wrapped myself in grey wool, with a knitted-on-large-needles wool band around the head, hair in two buns with twigs of rosemary sticking out of them and attached myself to a large spider's web, which I had crocheted onto a hula hoop, attaching a mummified skeleton and bat!

Jam wore all black, tucking a pillow down his pants at the back to make an abdomen, cutting legs out of foam and stuffing them into various pairs of my black tights, making a hole in one end of a leg to attach a ball of the wool which was attached to me as well – there's the togetherness part – a lot more practical – we could escape from each other when needed!

Even more hilarity on the tube ensued, this time people saying 'oh you're a dream-catcher', then spying the spider and saying 'ahhh I get it now!'

We went to two parties that night, the first, a birthday party in Richmond and the other, the same factory in Bow as last year, opposite sides of the district line, so a long time was spent on the tube, in which lots of people came and spoke with us, admired our costumes and even asked for photos! I wonder how we will top that idea next year?