I am sorry: M's field diary turns out not to contain the anthropological analysis on Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night I had hoped for. Maybe it will in the future - who knows, maybe after some encouraging fanmail, but in the meantime you will get a nice idea on http://www.bonefire.org/guy/index.php. What this site does not mention, I think, is how popular the celebration was in the nineteenth century, when it was in the first place an expression of anti-Catholic sentiments. Here in Exeter the event seems to have been especially grand (don't ask me why...), and I read stories about bonfires on the Cathedral Close (a large area surrounding the cathedral, and officially owned by it: within its walls you cannot drink alcohol for example), stories in which the fire got so out of hand that the cathedral itself got too hot to touch, and in the morning they had to collect the pieces that had burst off.

Two more notes:

Thinking back about what I wrote yesterday evening, it might give you the impression we had a horrible night. But surprisingly, although about everything went wrong, this is untrue. So there is no irony whatsoever in calling it "a most wonderful day"!

Finally, after some very long weeks, hospitality services is fulfilling its contractual duties again and has come to clean our kitchen and bathroom.

Had I already told you this? You probably know English-speaking Dutchers often use the expression "Go your gang", which is meant to be a joking synthesis of Dutch semantics, syntax and vocabulary, and English phonology and vocabulary. However, apparently this is a grammatical expression in English as well, with the minor change of the word "gang" into "gait", thus becoming "Go your gait". And it means the same!

Now I think about it I realise many of you must know this already, having seen or even played in King Lear, or maybe having read poetry by Dorothy Parker (in a not so complimental poem on "Men", see http://floozy.com/allison/rilke/dp.index.html, which, I think, applies to women just as well).