Bonfire Night

Exactly how does Guy Fawkes Night really help us define what it means to be English? Cheap fireworks exploding like gunfire for weeks on end; penny for the guy and frozen kids waving sparklers in car parks; adults burning effigies and piles of wood to celebrate the things that made Britain the country it is today - religious persecution, torture and severed heads on sticks. All a bit of fun? Can you really see many Iraqis spending the next four hundred years begging loose change and setting ropey old scarecrows on fire to keep the memory of Abu Ghraib alive?