Burn_Bay_Burn

There is one place I would like to visit before I die. Lewes, England. I hear Lewes is a dark grey sad town in the south of England that characterizes by little else than being just another industrial ugly little shit hole, but with a good brewerey. (Lewes is also the only place in Britain were they are allowed to have their own independant currency, the Lewes Pound). Once a year, on November 5th, the people of Lewes engage in the weirdest of celebrations. – A celebration that, if it weren’t because of its religious root, I would be there every year. So, what is it that people of Lewes do every November 5th' They Burn the Pope. Or to be clearer, an effigy of the Pope. People who have been there tell me that it is a once in a lifetime experience. Once in a lifetime, because to have 20,000 drunken Brits with torches in one place may be the last thing you see before being transferred to the local morgue. The origin to this celebration dates back to the days of a man called Guy Fawkes, whose real name was Guido, but that didn´t sound too professional, so he changed it to Guy. Mr. Fawkes did not have a happy ending. Depends on who you read, he was burned at the stake or hanged. But the matter of fact is that he was one an imbecile who tried to fight another bunch of imbeciles, so whatever the out come, an imbecile had to die. The kind of stories I like!! The story goes that the British king at the time (1600s´) had a crush on Spanish royal Hottie (Catherine of Aragon) and she wanted to turn Britain back to Catholicism and rescue the island from hundreds of years of protestant faith. Their daughter, Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary achieved the task and transformed Britain into a Roman Catholic Nation. Only to be restored back to Protestantism by her half sister Elizabeth I, When this was about to happen is when Mr. Fawkes decided to blow the shit out of the British Parliament and, of course he and his accomplises were caught red-handed and immediately sentenced to…and let me quote here, so as to give you the exact details of his sentence… …drawn backwards to his death, by a horse, his head near the ground. They were to be “put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both”. Their genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and their bowels and hearts removed. They would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed so that they might become “prey for the fowls of the air” You know you can always trust the British for an entertaining evening. Anyways, since then forth Britain celebrates the 5th of November as Bonfire night, in remembrance of the Protestants burnt alive by order of Bloody Mary, and in Lewes, Sussex they take it a step beyond and burn an effigy of the Pope, just to make he gets the message he is not wanted there at all. I guess they would burn the pope himself, but he is always coming up with excuses not to show up. In any case, I am not in favor of either one of he sides. If it were for me, I´d watch them burn each other in various degrees of unusual torture and degradation burning their genitals before their own eyes until all disappear and the rest of us can continue having a life on introspection and common sense. But still, I wonder. When the Pope visited England a few months ago, why wasn´t he taken to South Sussex for a short visit' I would have loved to see his face, but better yet I would have loved to see the Lewerians get a hold of him. With Drunk Britons you can always expect a surprise. To make things clearer for you, the movie V was inspired by story of Guy Fawkes.