I might go round there about three tomorrow morning, trick or treating.

It's four o'clock on the 6th November. Someone has just let off some fireworks nearby. It's the day after bonfire night. But it's not the Friday or Saturday after bonfire night; it's a Thursday. And it's not yet dark.

I can imagine getting over-excited on the 5th, and letting them off at four o'clock because you can't wait a moment longer. You'd have to be six years old, or a moron, but still, I can imagine it.
I can also imagine being busy on the 5th and yet being so keen on fireworks you postpone your display to the next day; or finding an extra box you forgot about yesterday, or getting some half price on the 6th because the shops are trying to get rid of them.

What I can't imagine is the combination. Postponing your Guy Fawkes night celebration until the day after... and then getting so overtaken by the sheer excitement of the occasion that you let them off in broad daylight. 'Four o'clock is late enough! We can imagine the pretty lights - they're the most boring part of a firework anyway. What's important is that we honour the historic occasion of it being 403 years and one day since a failed political assassination by making the noise 'bang', and that we do it NOW. There's not a moment to lose!'

All of this ire, incidentally, is provoked by the sight of the scardier of my two cats (who was visible for most of yesterday evening only as a cowardly furry arse poking out from behind the cupboard he had decided was the flat's closest approximation to a nuclear bunker), haring back to the house in the manner of a Trafalgar Square reveller on VE day who's just seen a Messerschmidt.