SO HOW was your New Year? Ours was going the usual way: champagne, Auld Lang Syne, a mutual hug-in, when someone suggested we launch Chinese flying lanterns. So what if the weather was -2C below and we were in the middle of boggy woods with a biting wind, and it was 1am in the morning?
Flying lanterns, the packet said, “are a quieter, gentler alternative to fireworks…safe and simple, from bio-degradable, flame retardant materials and easily replenished bamboo.”
Not only did we feel adventurous as we clambered through the pitch black of a stubbled field behind the cottage, we felt eco worthy. What we had failed to read, were the ten safety commandments and the particular instruction, “check wind direction before release’.
I’d first seen these phenomena in Goa ten years ago when at the stroke of midnight masses silently drifted across the sea and eerily upwards. Not ours. It took a lot of burnt matches, swearing and scorched palms to light the corners of the wax fuel cell. Finally, it took off not gently into the good night but in a rocket propelled straight line towards Mike’s brand new Audi. Like a naughty fire spirit it bounced along the roof and just as Mike struggled to get a grip on the bulbous white balloon it spat out flames and gusted into the neighbour’s garden and settled in an apple tree.
By this time one person had fallen over a wall, another into a pile of nettles and a third screaming to find a bucket and water which is why police in Britain had an unprecedented number of calls about UFOs, and flying bombs, and throughout the country perfectly respectable middle-aged party goers were being turned into dangerous arsonists.
With twenty minutes flying time these ‘under a fiver’ doodlebugs were apparently terrorising the night skies. Naturally, no-one took any notice of the instructions not to set them off within five miles of airports, or near trees, or in a more than 5mph wind.
As ours finally met its Armageddon by being ceremoniously stamped out, an armada of four drifted above us in star fleet formation. In Scotland, ex-RAF Councillor Caird believed he had witnessed not only extra terrestrials but that their sudden disappearance could only mean they had maximum warped into the galaxy. Sadly, it seems little more had happened than the tea lights which had hot aired them to heady heights had simply gone out.
It won’t be long, of course, before their danger and debris will be banned, because despite their prettiness they are killing animals. On Grange Farm, in Mickle Trafford, a pedigree cow died as metal from one pierced her windpipe and the NFU are calling for them to be outlawed as the British countryside becomes littered with tangled wire.
So unlaunched and unlit our last lantern will gather dust in the cupboard, an identified un-flying object…that is, perhaps, until one dark night a mysterious silent light hovers overhead…
