Dear Diary. [I wrote more here but have since lost it]

There's the smell of smoke. A couple of guys are dressed like Darth Maul, and they're carrying torches and running around the crowd scaring people. They're carrying torches with real fire mind you. Health and safety doesn't seem to be a big thing at this event.

Now everyone is invited to walk up to the effigy and light it. People have brought candles and lighters from home for this purpose. I hope to God there’s no one trapped inside under there. I hope this isn't where the creators of The Wicker Man got their idea from.

There's a sense of anticipation now. The flames are beginning to grow around the base of the pile of wood. There's an old wooden chair on the stack of wood, it’s going up in flames. People are backing off from the heat. Massive clouds of smoke are billowing out from the fire.

Now the demon is alight. He's still grinning. His eyes are burning, his whole body is alight now. His eyes are falling out, and bits of ash are floating through the air.

People are shooting fireworks now like at Disney's Magic Kingdom except at Magic Kingdom there was never a great big fire. I can feel the heat to have to back away. I can still make out the chair in the pile of woods but the effigy is gone. It's been burned into cinders and carried away on the buffets of hot wind. I want to see it burn, I want to see everything burn: Girona, Spain, everything. Okay, so maybe not that far.

0-year-old stares at the giant fire transfixed, his eyes, unblinking. Maybe he's going to be a pyromaniac from this early childhood experience. Actually, I think 0-year-old's a little bit scared. He's like a cat on Guy Fawkes night. He keeps looking around nervously. His head's spinning whenever there's a loud noise, spinning to look at the source of the noise. I mean, not spinning 360 degrees, like the Exorcist.

There's music playing from tiny CD player speakers and then a kind of amateur firework display. It's really good. This is the kind of atmosphere you want when you do fireworks. Children are running around unsupervised. When I lived in Montreal, there was a professional firework display every week by the river and this here now is way better. Not because the fireworks here are better but because it's smaller and it's more fun. It's what you want. In Montreal it was boring. It was just thousands of people gathered around to silently watch some boring and sterile fireworks display. Here there's a real sense of danger about everything. People are casually tossing fireworks around. 4-year-old and his other friends are using sparklers, and one of his friends is holding the sparkler up to a tree to see if the tree will catch fire. There's a sense of interactivity about it if only in the sense that you have to jump out away when someone throws a lit firework at your leg.

It's dark now, we're still in the park. There's a sense of menace and anarchy, like in The Purge. I hope it's not going to be like The Purge because I wouldn't last long in a Purge-like event, I'd be one of the first to die due to my lack of agility and poor coordination. It's 10 pm. It's way past 4-year-old’s bedtime. It's almost past my bedtime as well. I'm ready to go now, it's going to be boring. I don't have any drugs and trying to cross the park, it's like trying to cross a battlefield. Bangs and explosion, 0-year-old’s looking up at me from the pram, a look of confusion on his face.