Light Up the Night

I was having a quick chat with my Belarusian tech support trying to convince them that simply because they had harvested my DNA while I slept I was not liable for child support for any of the resulting mutated offspring they had created in their research facilities when the smell of smoke drifted across my room.  I sniffed and looked around for the source.  I noticed my tech support were doing the same.

"Guys is that anything to do with you?"

They shook their heads in unison.

"Are you sure?"

"Oh yes, political prisoners have a completely different smell."

Slightly panicked I started looking for a source of the burning when the lightly charred face of my Tasmanian correspondent appeared on the screen.  Despite a distinct frizziness to her hair and some interesting facial blisters she seemed in good spirits.

"Sorry about the smoke, that's me."

"If you've taken up smoking you're doing it wrong."

"No, idiot.  We had a torchlight parade.  And gluhwein.  Quite a lot of gluhwein actually."

It would appear that Tasmania's No Festival Season has officially ended.  The next glut of festivals started in a rather modest way with a local one that my correspondent engages in.  Partly out of solidarity with her neighbours, partly for the sake of her children but mainly for the gluhwein.

It seems that in the dark and cold of a Tasmanian Winter night such of my correspondents neighbours as can be dragged out of doors by their children engage in a torchlight procession.  At first I wondered if this was some sort of political protest with the outraged peasantry snatching up torches and storming the castle where hideous and unnatural experiments were taking place.  Then I remembered that my tech support were based in Minsk and were unlikely to be the target of a bunch of suburban Tasmanians no matter how pissed off they were.

Apparently this was the Tasmanian's idea of fun.  Or at least running up and down the streets waving burning brands in the faces of all and sundry was their children's idea of fun.  To get the parents on board there was gluhwein.  Aglow with community spirit my correspondent had marshalled her children, given them incendiary devices and unleashed them onto the streets.  Other parents had done the same.  Strangely despite the presence of a parcel of prepubescent pyromaniacs most of the suburb remained stubbornly unburnt. 

The parents, somewhat nervously given the amount of flame knocking about, marshalled their offspring and herded them in the direction of a bonfire in the quarry.  Once there the children were entertained by a fire twirler, the parents were entertained by gluhwein and everybody stood perhaps a little too close to the bonfire.

It is this sort of rich cultural heritage that in earlier times served the vital purpose of weeding the less viable from the gene pool.  Sadly today's safety culture has started to intrude on even this innocent attempt at child murder.  My correspondent spoke in tones of withering contempt of certain parents who, rather than trust their six year old with a flaming torch, provided them with LED lights instead.  She, I and my tech support in a rare burst of unity agreed that it was this sort of mollycoddling that was breeding a generation of useless parasites who didn't even know how to treat third degree burns.

I was intrigued by the fire twirler though.  It seems that except in explicit festival times such things are rare in Hobart.  Street performers, hippies, the professionally outraged and varying degrees of activists used to descend on the city to protest about forests (I think they were in favour of them) and things.  Now, however, they apparently locate themselves a little closer to the forests they are trying to protect (or possibly log) and don't hang around in Hobart much at all.  Thus the acquiring of a fire twirler was a bit of a coup.

Speaking of the protesters apparently one of them was a surfer from Byron Bay.  He decided that he would go for a surf in the waters off Tasmania in the middle of Winter, without wearing a wetsuit.  So it seems as though we are still coming up with ways of winnowing the inadequate out of the gene pool, or gene surf in this instance.  Everybody warned him but he did it anyway and he died.  This would be hysterically funny if it wasn't for the fact that a police officer and a kayaker were hurt trying to save this clown.