After a year enjoying some serious French hospitality, I rashly decide we should put on a traditional English Guy Fawkes Night for our new friends. The thinking is that if the food or wine disappoint I can blame them shamelessly on English tradition. So just before heading back to France, I buy 40 rock-hard toffee apples which rather weirdly the BAA allows me to board with, though I am relieved of a tub of lip gloss and a tube of Zovirax.
Back home, and husband makes a text-book bonfire, the kids make a wobbly papier mache Guy and I lean heavily on Nigella for chilli and brownies. Momentarily, I am in control.
Two hours before our Guy Fawkes Night starts, I find the imported toffee apples have been left on the floor; on our underfloor-heated floor. English tradition is now a selection of soggy apples on soggy sticks and a plastic bag of sticky syrup. One hour to go and my carefully constructed playlists are inexplicably wiped off the ipod. Finally, a German passenger boat passing under a bridge causes a 2-hour blackout across large parts of Western Europe, including our own village (but not the one next door). The ipod, fairy lights and under-floor heating forgotten, we crouch around the bonfire, toasting marshmallows and writing our names with sparklers. That, after all, is English tradition.
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