Eternal Damnation, Fires of

Spent the morning moving things around the house in preparation for the PuddleBurnParty. May the skies remain dry until the last attendee has got safely home. I shall perform some suitable incantations.

After gymnastics, visited Asda to stock up on beer and bombs because we didn't have enough. The PuddleDaddies are notoriously thirsty and there's never quite enough fireworks, you know the way it is. This room has been set aside for Dr Evil the Alcoholic Apothecary. At Erin's house, Dr Evil (a gestalt entity of all the silliest PuddleDaddies) invented both Purest Green™ and CherryBombs®: it is hoped that a new concotion will be born to further refresh their addled minds. This beer collection grew significantly as people arrived laden with hoppy wares.

The first arrived a little after 5 and then it just never stopped. It took us a while to create the Guy out of old clothes and scrumbled-up newspapers but as there were 3 heads we made a second guy, renamed Gay Fawkes as it was wearing the pink skirt that Erin hated so much and a lot of make-up.

Then we had our food which was special dinosaur eggs from BensMum in little pirate boats. Then Guy and Gay were installed on the toilet seat atop the fire and summarily incinerated. For a while we nipped outside to the football ground and set off sky-lanterns. Because we'd opened the packets before setting off many got irreparably damaged and only 2 lifted off properly, they didn't gain sufficient height and scooted off at about 10 feet off the ground. The fireworks went on forever and I got to light some of them.

One small rocket didn't lift off properly and chased us down the garden: it whizzed between us and exploded on the floor at our feet. That woke us up a bit. Another one fell over at an angle and shelled the neighbours' garden with balls of purple fire and yet another rocket only just cleared the garden wall and exploded next door. Most recommended a 25 metre exclusion zone but in a garden our size that's not really possible so we all endured a constant rain of oxidised magnesium particles. Ruby and Millie and Baby Edward stayed with us so both of their parents could sample the beer and have a laugh.

But the giant rockets from Ben and Erin were great, really big display-sized ones. The fireplace was very busy and overflowed a few times, there were only a few bits of wood left at the end which went on the following morning. The pinata was quite tough to burst but had extra toys inside, not just sweeties this time. We also sat down and made our own rockets out of kitchen roll tubes etc, quite artistic in many cases.

It was quite late at going-home time, I got to bed a little after midnight ("It's not even today any more!") and slept through to 11am. Another Puddle success and quite hard work for all of us little people, just you wait until it's clearing-up time. 4 packets of sparklers were left over but there'll be another Puddleparty along in a minute, just you wait. We also completely forgot the 8 large cardboard guitars that the blokes were supposed to pose with before firing them.