Disclaimer: unofficial & reflects no official position.
Dear student:
A classroom is artificial.
Not what you say but how:cf.:
"Mr X is a dishonest rogue" or " Mr X is falsely accused of dishonesty and roguery"
Teacher is happy with either!
In class I put " Murder, " on the board. Why? As an example of vocab. you need, not something I want you to go onto the street and do-
(though I've got a little list..)
Sunday 8 November 2015
A vanishing feastday , Mike's personal view for NI1 last year etc
5th of November aka Bonfire night aka Guy Fawkes night aka Fireworks night Click to one bonfire
Boy with sparkler
I enjoyed Guy Fawkes night as a boy in the 1950s. It was very like "la noche de San Juan":
a bonfire, with an effigy, a "guy" on top,
A rocket
A " banger"
fireworks,
and food......... simple pleasures.
But, more in my day , it was also very different.
Perhaps 85% of the English live in houses with a garden , or at least a yard , big enough for a bonfire.
Usually, it was a family party, at home, but outside. So for several days you had to find old wood and old furniture, etc to burn.
The killjoys (mata-alegrias=aguafiestas) and trendies (=progres) have nearly killed this festivity! Only public fireworks remain .So American halloween (vomit! ) has been imported to replace it!Child with sparkler: Prohibit! forbid! Ban! Uncontrolled fun ! Danger! Anarchy! British! unMarxist !Tradition! Racist! Bad!Stop! Immoral!
In my day , the food : was soup, and potatoes roasted in the embers (ascuas) - sausages were still a luxury in the fifties!
History:
Go HERE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux7JvZJbJPU&feature=share&list=LP8iBur54c82s to READ the basic story in simple English.
You need: to plot, a plotter, gunpowder. a cellar= a basement, to set fire to, to go into hiding, to blow up
Roasting a potato in the embers(ascuas.) When I was very young, the potatoes were cooked in clay (barro).You mould wet clay around each potato! Cooking takes hours and hours , often until next year. The Modern methodAluminium foil = silver paper= papel albal IS QUICKER.
(Cooking tip: rub salt and pepper and butter , or oil, into the potato skin before wrapping in foil)
I am told whole hedgehogs (erizos) cooked in clay, like we used to cook potatoes, in embers are very good. I don't know!
NOWADAYS
There are sausages, hotdogs, adults have mulled wine or mulled ale (= hot wine or beer with spices )...
Odd notes :
1
There was a slang pair: Guys and dolls
Guys = peleles = tios
Dolls= muñecas = tias
But then the politically correct and the feminists shouted for years, to not call females dolls.....
well , it isn't respectful, true,.....
..... BUT to keep guy, for girls as well...........
I do NOT like being called guy (ni tio, en cuanto a eso)
Rag dolls
I don't quite see what a lady gains by being a pelele instead of a muñeca.....
2.
" BONFIRE"comes from" bone-fire."
Before Christianty, which buried dead people, many pagan peoples burnt their dead ones.
It was typical in Imperial Rome, for example. Some religions believed it liberated the spirit for reincarnation, etc.
But
in the British isles it istoo wet for easy cremation.
AND
Fresh bodies need a lot of fuel to burn.
Especially one at a time.
However
Rotten bodies are more combustible.
You need LESS fuel
Especially several bodies at the same time
So
you buried your dead bodies for a few months , then, perhaps once a year, dug them up for a fire together.*
So
on a bonfire 2000 years ago, you didn't have a guy.
You had aunt Jackie, cousin fred, grannie, sister biliie.........
Fun!
*The cremation IS certain in prechristian , both Celtic and Roman, Britain. There is so much archeological eveidence that it can be fairly reliably used to plot the dates of the spread of Christianity etc. Check here in eg, The local museum in c/18 near the "corte ingles"
The method of ritual partial defleshing/temporary burial and subsequent burning is indicated for the Bronze age Remedello culture in Northern Italy. It is very probable , but not yet absolutely proven , for the British Isles.
Today’s extravaganzas may be dazzling, but they lack the amateur charm of yesteryear
From Tuesday's Daily Telegraph
Do you remember the good old days when firework displays were so much more rubbishy than the pyrotechnical extravaganzas we have to endure today? I do – and I miss them greatly. No, really. The shows may have got bigger and better, but Bonfire Night has lost all the charm it had in the era of “penny for the Guy”, cheap rockets and sparklers on your back lawn.
Boy with sparkler
Yes, I know kids will find this hard to believe, but there was a time when Bonfire Night was a cosy domestic event, far removed from the current week-long post-Hallowe’en hangover of paganism, noise and begging-with-menaces. It took place on one day and one day only, whose purpose every child in the land knew because of a celebrated rhyme.
“Remember, remember the 5th of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot,” it went. Perhaps there was more thereafter – something about “forgot”, maybe? – but rather like with Auld Lang Syne, it was only the opening bit that really mattered. This was a day when a bad man called Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and got caught just in time – with the happy result that, ever after, children were allowed to mark the anniversary by letting off fireworks.
We knew he was called Guy Fawkes for at least two reasons. First, schools back then – even the most bog-standard ones – still taught historical facts with names and dates rather than wishy-washy empathy studies of the “You’re an oppressed Victorian washerwoman: how do you feel?” variety. Second, the braver among us would fabricate a giant, rag-doll-like thing out of cloth and stuffing, stand in the street and politely importune passers-by for a “penny for the Guy”.
Only a penny? This, you can tell, was in the days before galloping, -induced inflation, in times so innocent that Jimmy Savile was nothing more than an eccentric entertainer who could “fix” exciting things for you on his popular television show.
Letting children run around on their own – unlike today’s trick-or-treaters, with their parents hovering yards behind – wasn’t the worst of it. There was also the attitude to ’elf ’n’ safety.(= health and safetey laws ) Sure, there were lots of scary warnings on programmes such as John Craven’s Newsround about the terrible things that might happen if you played with fireworks unsupervised. But there was certainly none of that nonsense you get today – especially at public displays – where spectators are corralled so far from the launch zone that even the bonfire looks little bigger than a match.
Not, as a rule, that we went to public displays. Maybe in London they did, but not in the sticks. Bonfire Night was a friends-and-family affair. In the morning, you’d nip with the Responsible Adult (your dad) down to the newsagents to pick up a packet or two of Brock’s finest. Later, you’d trail him round the garden, advising him on where best to stick the Catherine Wheel and nagging him as to when you could light the sparklers, while the grown-ups ate sausages and drank mulled wine.
Next thing you knew, it would all be over for another year. And all you’d have to look forward to was going round the garden the next day, retrieving all the burnt-out husks (secretly hoping to find an intact one that Responsible Adult had overlooked) and seeing how far the rockets had travelled.
And the fireworks themselves? Shockingly dull by modern standards. About the only real thrill was when they did what they weren’t supposed to do – such as failing to go off, thus providing the amusement of watching Responsible Adult edging towards it as if it were a UXB, or going completely mad, like the Catherine Wheel always did, either by setting fire to the wood to which it was pinned or careering perilously across the lawn. But that was what sparklers were for: waved fast enough and near enough to siblings’ faces, and you could almost imagine yourself into a state of near-excitement.
Since then, like most parents of my era, I’ve had to adapt to the modern age. Around Bonfire Night, whether you like it or not, you have to fork out for tickets for the big local event (I live even deeper in the sticks than I did as a child, and there have still been three to choose from) and you have to stand around freezing for hours waiting for the moment when you can go “ooh” and “ah”.
And you do go “ooh” and “ah” when eventually the fireworks are launched, because the whole business has got so much more slick and professional and, what with the price of those tickets, a lot of money has gone into that cordite.
But though these big events are so much better pyrotechnically, what they’re lacking is the intimacy, bumbling amateurishness, convenience, silliness and innocence of a proper Bonfire Night – nights that appear to be becoming as distant a memory as the name of the Catholic conspirator in whose dishonour they used to be held.
.
Now more reading
The POPE is only burnt, in effigy , in one or two places in the UK
Cristina Odone is the sister of the boy whose story was told in the film Laurences' oil
Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.
Remember, remember the 5th of November. How could I, a Catholic, forget?
I first came to Britain in 1979, and promptly fell in love. Wide-eyed and enthusiastic as only a 17 year old can be, raised on the Brontes, Dickens and Austen, I found romance in every corner of this green and pleasant land. The architecture, the rolling countryside, and oh, those wonderful traditions! Like a needy girlfriend, I desperately wanted to fit in, and worried that my mid-Atlantic accent (a mixture of Italian convent school and American high school) and my preppy clothes would single me out as foreign.
I was wrong. What distinguished me from the great majority of Britons I met was my faith. Being a Catholic marked me out as the "odd one" (my rather obvious nickname at college). I couldn't believe the prejudice I encountered. My first boyfriend's mother warned him that if he married me I would send all his money to Rome, to line the Vatican coffers. The science teacher at school said he knew why I wasn't doing it for A Level: Catholics didn't believe in evolution. And a classmate who visited my room expressed surprise when she couldn't see a plastic Madonna or a candle in the mould of the bleeding heart of Jesus.
This wasn't Northern Ireland, but north Oxford. I was shocked, saddened – and then repulsed, as I watched a chanting jeering crowd on the telly hold up an effigy of the Pope, only to the set it alight. My beloved, civilised, romantic Britain had a dark streak running through it: anti-Popery.
When I later read history, I understood just how ingrained this bigotry was. Linda Colley's Britons was particularly shattering: we Catholics were the "outlandish" people ready to betray England to the Pope. Our allegiances were suspect, our mission clear: we prayed for the conversion of every Protestant we met.
I had hoped that my adopted homeland would overcome its ancient prejudice. It hasn't: even in 2013, Britons see the 5th of November as a chance to show my "outlandish" community that they hold it in contempt
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.
Guy Fawkes:" Guy Fawkes 'twas his intent to blow up the King and Parliament…"
I went to a local bonfire over the weekend. It was a damp evening, and there must have been a fair amount of diesel involved but, having an article in the current edition of the Catholic Herald about the non-sectarian nature of modern Guy Fawkes Night, I felt more or less obliged to attend.
Cristina Odone posted a blog the other day about Britain's anti-Catholic tradition, which she was disgusted to see openly celebrated every year on 5 November. Many foreign visitors are, like Cristina, revolted by the whole affair. The British are not a notably spiritual people, yet once a year they appear to revel in a macabre orgy of anti-popery.
Bonfire Night is a big deal in my South East region, which was strong for Puritanism in the sixteenth century and for Parliament in the seventeenth. There are villages in East Sussex and West Kent, in particular, where bonfires are lit throughout October and November, and where all sorts of people are burned in effigy (I remember at least two Tony Blairs).
If you are reading overseas, you may find the whole business distasteful. But if you're British, you'll know that the sectarian origins of the event have long since been lost. I polled the people around the orange sparks in my corner of Hampshire. What, I asked, were we commemorating? Most didn't know: it was simply an annual fireworks display. The few who mentioned Guy Fawkes recalled that he was a terrorist who had wanted to blow up Parliament. One sincerely thought we were celebrating his plot rather than its defeat. No one mentioned religion.
I have no idea of the confessional affiliations (if any) of most the participants. This being England, one obviously doesn't ask. I happened to know in three cases, though. One couple was Catholic, one C of E, and one mixed C of E and Presbyterian. What I can honestly say, having lit bonfires all over my Home Counties region over the past 15 years, is that I've never come across the slightest whiff of sectarianism – and, believe me, I have a finer nose for it than most, being Ulster Catholic on one side and Scottish Presbyterian on the other.
Guy Fawkes Night is vestigial, like an ostrich's wing. It recalls time when the English-speaking peoples defined themselves largely with reference to religion. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first England and then Britain were in a state of semi-permanent war with Spain and France. Perhaps understandably, people tended to think of their nation as having a special mission. Its military victories were seen as providential, part of God's plan for His chosen people. We bawl out the opening lines of Rule Britannia so often that we barely pause to listen: "When Britain first at Heaven's command arose from out the azure main…"
Americans took this self-definition much further. As John Winthrop told his fellow pilgrims on the Mayflower, they were "entering into a contract and covenant" with God. He had led them to a promised land, and they in exchange must keep themselves undefiled. Among other things, they must guard against what he saw the idolatry and superstition which had taken over, not only Rome, but the only half-reformed Church of England.
Cristina might be interested to know that Guy Fawkes Night was enthusiastically celebrated in the colonies, especially in Massachusetts. It was George Washington who quashed the tradition, concerned that the burning of papal effigies would deter Canadian Catholics from joining the revolution. That episode has been edited from America's collective memory. As the historian J.C.D. Clarke acutely observed, “the virulence and power of popular American anti-Catholicism is the suppressed theme of colonial history.”
The event that probably made the American Revolution inevitable was not the Stamp Act (which was swiftly repealed) but Britain's recognition in 1774 of the traditional rights of the Catholic Church in Quebec. Delegates to the First Continental Congress raged at what they saw as a sickening betrayal:
And by another Act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended… that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.
Popular anti-Catholicism, in North America as in Great Britain, was political, not doctrinal. It had little to do with whether you believed in priestly celibacy or praying for the souls of the dead. Rather, English-speaking Protestants tended to suppose – wrongly, as the greatest Whig historian, Lord Macaulay, allowed – that Catholics would ultimately be loyal to a foreign prince.
John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers, who went on to become the first Chief Justice of the United States, argued that his home state of New York should extend full toleration to every sect "except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of this State, until such a time as they shall most solemnly swear that no pope, priest or foreign authority on earth hath power to absolve the subjects of this State from their allegiance to the same."
John Adams, the second American president, wondered, “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?” Thomas Jefferson, the third, believed that Catholicism was inseparable from political authoritarianism: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
Of all the chapters in my book, How we Invented Freedom (Inventing Freedom in the U.S. edition), I found this one the most painful to write. The association of Protestantism with national identity led to centuries of institutionalised discrimination and unofficial bigotry. Yet the story ends well.
The US quickly overcame its sectarian origins to become the first state on Earth based on total religious freedom. Britain was slower – not until 1829 were Catholics completely equal in law – but still far ahead of most places. By way of comparison, the Spanish Inquisition was not wound up until 1834.
Attitudes outlast legal changes, and you still occasionally hear anti-Catholic remarks in corners of the Anglosphere: Glasgow, Liverpool, even Toronto. But, in general, you have to go to Northern Ireland to find what used to be widespread across Great Britain, North America and Australia, namely a sense of Protestant identity that doesn't depend upon church attendance.
What changed? Most obviously, we grew up. Sectarianism declined as people realised that their neighbours could disagree with them without threatening their way of life. The association of Catholicism with autocracy and standing armies, once almost universally made, now sounds downright silly. (I recently had the pleasure of discovering the works of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, whose Salamanca School was almost as libertarian in its philosophy as Hayek or Rothbard.) As church attendance dwindled, different denominations were thrown together – and have arguably come closer in doctrine: Catholics tend to place rather more emphasis on the Bible than they used to, Protestants on the Eucharist. While all this was happening, English-speaking Catholics refuted the charge of divided loyalties in the most unarguable way, as a glance at any war memorial will tell you.
It's interesting to observe a parallel debate over Islam today. Once again, prejudice is based, not on doctrinal differences (no one complains of Muslims keeping the fast or praying five times a day), but on fears of split allegiances. British Muslims are learning, as British Catholics once did, that even the most baseless accusations need to be answered patiently and courteously, and that public displays of patriotism are part of the assimilation process.That, though, is for another blog.
5th of November 
aka
Child with sparkler: Prohibit! forbid! Ban! Uncontrolled fun ! Danger! Anarchy! British! unMarxist !Tradition! Racist! Bad!Stop! Immoral!
cooked in clay, like we used to cook potatoes, in embers are very good.
and nagging him as to when you could light the sparklers, while the grown-ups ate sausages 
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