Now, I'm very much looking forward to the firework party in Ladbroke Square, probably the best in London, which is happening tonight. I'll be popping to and fro across the road to the exhibition opening at Vessel in Kensington Park Road where Angel are hosting a party and launching a new collection of glass in his gallery.
It should be interesting to see whether its true that fatuous and wholly commercial Halloween celebrations have become more more popular than Guy Fawkes night - as was recently mourned by A N Wilson.
Mind you, its quite astonishing that we have what is an anti Papal celebration for an event that did not even happen...the near anillation, using gunpowder, of a landmark building in the very heart of the capital.
Furthermore, it wasn't the buildings that make up the houses of Parliament as we now know and love. The building that Fawkes tried to blow up doesn't exist because it was burnt down for real in the 1834! A clerk was ordered to burn the faggots which for decades had been stored underneath Parliament- the faggots that were records that you had paid your taxes. The trouble was that he was a typical civil servant and pretty inept. He burnt the entire place down.
That monumental scene was witnessed by a spellbound Turner, some say Rossetti (although he only would have been 6), Pugin (who funnily enough became a Catholic the following year as he started work on the new building with the architect Charles Barry) and even Dickens (who like Pugin was only 22). They were all standing with the masses on boats in the Thames so tightly packed together witnessing the spectacle that it is said that you could walk across from the north to south bank.
But no, we don't celebrate that real and spectacular destruction of the seat of Parliament - though we must thank Turner who did do at least 4 pictures.
And if we think that the failed attempt of the destruction of an iconic building in the heart of our capital is worthy of an anual 'light spectacular', in which we blow a considerable portion of our savings , what perhaps should our bretheren across the pond be doing in to mark 9/11?
That must surely be made a greater and more meaningful remembrance and be in our psyche for evermore. Lets celebrate our defiance that we will not be defeated by terrorism and celebrate too those that were taken in an event so violent that is still hard to fathom after all this time. That, surely, is worthy of us all getting outside and looking and marvelling at the heavens for a few hours one evening each year.