From her hilltop stoop, reader, where she smokes her cigarette and sips her coffee and cogitates over Montaigne, your mouse can see at least ten distinct fireworks displays, and hear what must be dozens more. From her room the sound, she thinks, must be very like the sound of a particularly jumpy London night in 1940.

The Fourth of July has nothing, reader, nothing on the Fifth of November.

Which, it must be said, is the strangest of national holidays.

It is, for one, clearly the gift of a benevolent Clio to bemused early modernists everywhere.

It is also anathema in some instinctive way, with its celebration of the squashing of Treasons and Plots, to a mouse who grew up on national holidays that celebrate vanquishing tyranny, who has stood awestruck on a hot summer night at the Place de la Bastille while an entire city caroused around her to a rhythmic voice reading Victor Hugo over a loudspeaker. Nota bene that your mouse is not proud of the swashbucklingly Revolutionary feelings inspired in her by French nationalism, but sometimes a girl simply cannot help it if she wants to be, just for a few hours, a bare-breasted, banner-brandishing, musket-toting Delacroix pipedream.

Ahem. Back to our Fifth. It is, most simply and most strangely, a big, explosive celebration of the failure of things to explode. But then, there is, as James tells us, a “time when no man ought to keep silence.” This is evidently one of those times.

These occasions tend to produce lots of anxieties in my little heart. Nationalism, xenophobia, war and their emblems make me more than a little skittish. There is in Guy Fawkes, too, an easy ahistorical slide to be made directly to the modern religious terrorist. Surely there is something latently topical even in the most innocent of these fireworks shows. Bravado hitched to national sentiment – and alcohol – can be a terrifying thing to behold.

But it is beautiful, too, reader. It is beautiful, too.

I watch the trajectories of blinking red lights emerging over a distant hill from the nearby air traffic hub, wonder what pilots and controllers make of the persistent explosions, and make a mental note to myself to fly over England on some November fifth to come. The bonfires, the glittering everycolor starbursts — from the air it must look like the whole world’s gone mad. Which, of course, it has. It is only that on these occasions of loud, paradoxical display of untenable national sentiments it becomes saliently clear to those of us who don’t live in warzones just how mad.

And so I creep quietly back to Montaigne, to cogitation, and to the relative sanity — or rather, organized insanity — of my slightly-bombarded sanctuary of books and papers.