Amongst other things, Nic is a writer and director for theatre and film...
... so doesn't have a lot of time to update this site.
I was lucky enough to be present at the fallas in Valencia in March a few years ago, a festival which has evolved from early pagan celebrations at the beginning of Spring, in which leftover firewood was burned in honour of the local village saints, into the largest yearly fireworks display in Europe.
Photo Credit: Hermen Paca 
As night enfolds, the city; sleepy at midday and with barely a soul to be seen; erupts into something akin to a living creature's cardiovascular system. People throb through the streets, welling out into the wider areas, shuffling through the smaller ratruns, living rivers of humanity squeezed together tightly enough to wash one another in the direction of flow, but all in good humour.
Food is sold everywhere, in the cafes (which regularly run empty at the end of the night), in the streets where sweets and churros with chocolate are available, the better to stop up your heart valves. The night air is filled with the sweat of happy humanity, pissed, stoned, smiling, beautiful, seductive and high on the rhythm of the festival.
One makes one's way through the marching bands (not a sober musician amongst them), the parades of villages and villagers, the exquisitely crafted depictions of the village saints, some only a few feet high, some towering sixty feet above us, and all of which will be burned on the final day of the festival, stopping, here and there, to sup from a bar or feast from a stall. Everywhere small fireworks light the night sky and the roads are littered with impromptu bonfires. It is a sociable riot with good taste in cuisine.
After any number of hours wandering, during which the thunderflashes, the snatches of music and the liberal measures of alcohol all serve to disorientate and bewilder, in the manner of a tribal gathering, until all one is certain of is that one is surrounded by one's fellow man, a quickening comes over the crowds and we flow as one in the general direction of the dry river bank and the old bridge, where we shuffle and chortle, dodging bangers and hand-ignited rockets.
Then comes the main fireworks display.
Photo Credit: JorgeGT 
I have seen fireworks. I have been a small boy with a lighter and packet of dodgy rockets from the corner shop. I have been a family member with a back garden riddled with Standard's best offerings, lovingly tended to by my father. I have seen organised displays run by carefully suited figures who know exactly what they are doing, call themselves 'incendiary engineers' and synchronise the explosions to delightful classical music. I have seen lunatics with no fear of death, shaven heads, wild looks in their eyes and a predilection for stealing pink tanks from the Roundhouse come close to personal incineration in their attempts to remove any traces of darkness from a night sky. But this...
This was a symphony of light.
Here's the thing: after a few minutes; long, long after one might reasonably think a fireworks display of that magnitude must finish, purely on the basis of cost; long, long after the throbbing explosions have ceased being sound and have become palpable bodily sensations; I was no longer looking at a fireworks display. I was watching variations on the Big Bang. I was watching internalised thoughtforms in their most abstracted nature light up the sky before me. I had ceased to exist, as had the minds of the thousands around me, and we had identified totally with the spectacle before us. There was no need for some pathetic underscoring of music with which to synchronise the clusters of light, or the ovals that danced across the sky like some vast, fiery jellyfish. The fireworks themselves provided their own soundtrack. A myriad different explosions, a dozen different types of scream, thunder and lightning dancing in the sky before us and still it went on. The fallas are, ultimately, a celebration of the patron saint of the village and, as a horsehead nebula of smoke rose from the ground and peered around itself, lit from within by sparkling arcs of light so that it glowed and flowed, above, starbursts made from fragments of rainbow fell into a cycle of explosions and dying, screeching hisses ... boomboomBOOM ... eeeeeeeeeessssssss .... boomboomBOOM .... eeeeesssss .... we could hear the gargantuan lungs of Valencia's saint breathing as she peered around herself, borrowing our thousand thousand minds to admire herself before she sank back into the ground with three, graceful reports which woke us from our trance and gave us back to ourselves.
And this is what England lacks. There is a strong vein of anarchism lurking in the Spanish and these festivals are as much a celebration of personal freedom as they are re-enactments of historical revolutions. They send out a clear yet peaceable message that, if it should be required, thousands of people are quite happy to mobilise and burn things. Should someone let off a small banger in the middle of town in London, a squad of rozzers would be in there faster than you could say pseudo-democracy. In Valencia, not only were the police barely present, there was never, never, not ever, a suggestion that these rivers of humanity might suddenly turn, or panic. They were in control of themselves and each other, and they were aware of the fact. It was refreshing and heart-warming.
