Step 1: Remember last year when you paid good money to stand in the cold covering your kid’s ears because they didn’t like the noise. Resolve not to be so daft this year and instead observe the local fireworks from the bedroom window.
Step 2: Kids, who have very short memories indeed, come home in early November having discussed Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot at school and tell you that they simply MUST attend a firework display, and proceed to mention it at every opportunity.
Step 3: Decide that maybe it’ll be fun!
And it’s tradition after all. Purchase a family ticket to the local firework display the following weekend. Yay! Kids are excited, everyone’s happy.
Step 4: Wait until day of display. Note with dismay that it’s pissing it down. Bloody marvellous. Toy with the idea of cancelling, but that would be £20 down the drain… and the kids still want to go, so standing in the rain it is. What a bloody martyr you are.
Step 5: Attempt to locate hats, scarves, gloves, wellies and waterproof coats for entire family. Convince children that matching gloves are not a necessity.
Step 6: Leave house. Wonder whether getting soaked on the way there is better than spending 45 minutes driving around looking for a sodding parking space.
Step 7: Decide to walk – at least you can go via the cashpoint to get money for beer. Might as well make the most of it…
Step 8: Wait in sodden field in pissing rain for fireworks to start, with whiney backdrop of children badgering for flashing swords and/or hotdogs despite having eaten half an hour earlier.
Step 9: Spend booze money on bloody flashing swords.
Step 10: Spend next half hour standing in rain, without beer, begging kids not to thwack each with swords and hoping no one needs a piss because the portaloo looks a bit ropey and has a queue you’d expect at Glastonbury.
Step 11: Fireworks time! OOOH. AAAAH. Etc.
Step 12: Console crying children who, much as you bloody well predicted, do not like fireworks because they’re too loud and their socks are wet because they stamped in a fucking puddle. FML.
Step 13: Spend another half hour attempting to leave sodden field with sword-wielding hyperactive children and decide that next year, you’ll definitely stay at home…
Step 14: Regret those pissing flashing swords for the rest of your days.