Richard Baum

Walking outside at this time of year is often quite surreal. For most of the English winter, a dry, cold evening is a time for venturing forth hearing only the crispy leaves and seeing only your breath in the freezing air.

But for the first week in November there is a Kate Adie war report soundtrack and an apocalypse-mist foggy backdrop added to the mix, as hundreds of tonnes of grade-A ordnance is blown up in gardens nationwide for bonfire night.

It is a depressing but winnable bet that most of the people blowing up their fireworks have little knowledge of why precisely they’re doing it. And I’ll make that bet a double-header by wagering that more people create explosions in honour of the failure to blow up Parliament than actually vote in elections these days. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to think about who’s to blame for that.

What I do know is that stepping outside now looks and sounds like I am momentarily leaving the safety of Prestwich for the streets of a war-zone somewhere. It’s very bizarre. But comforting in a very English way. I may well be running scared of the faint but scary possibility of feral hooded BMX-ers lobbing lit roman-candles my way, but at least I know I’m home.

It has been brought to my attention that someone has dumped a cargo container on the corner of Bury New Road and St Ann’s Road and is flogging fireworks from within. I have alerted the Police, and both the Police and I paid the container a visit on Friday. The proprietors claim to have both the fire service licence to store fireworks, and the trading standards licence to sell them. And, according to the Police, they can prove the first of these claims. So the Police can’t shut them down.

I have left an urgent message with Trading Standards (who are closed at weekends) to verify whether or not they are legally trading. If they are, I would very much like to know why Trading Standards thought it a wise idea to allow them to start peddling explosives from a street corner in my ward out of the side of a cargo container dumped on a pavement. What next? Arms dealing from a portakabin in the park? At a time when we are all trying to make Bonfire Night as safe as possible, I am far from comfortable seeing fireworks sold from a place that looks like it’s run by Del Boy Trotter.

And of course, if they are trading illegally, I have asked that the Trading Standards staff head down there with the Police in tow on Monday morning and not only shut the operation down, but arrest and punish those selling the fireworks. We cannot have dangerous fireworks being sold illegally anywhere, and I won’t allow it here.

The container and its cargo will be gone by Tuesday of course. But even if nothing can be done in time, we need to make sure that this isn’t repeated next year.

Rick