The strange case of the everlasting bonfire

The bonfire burned and burned, choking out black smoke, and when my headache got so bad I could barely see straight, I decided I would have to look into it.

I say this at every year’s end: I am so tired of fighting. I sometimes wish I could lose this supernatural gift I have for attracting causes, unearthing conspiracies and refusing to take the official line. It’s not a gift, it’s a curse.

‘I see dead people,’ said the boy in that film about ghosts. I see problems, underneath the surface of everything, no matter how shiny. It drives me mad. I wish I could become normal and believe in what things look like on the outside. But I came into the world suspicious. I was born a cynic.

This bonfire in a field next to where my horses live gets lit every bonfire night for a fireworks event held by a pub which borders that field on the other side. And every year it goes on burning for weeks, sometimes months. Local people have been contacting me for some time asking me to look into it. But until I started keeping my horses in the field right next door to the bonfire, I always thought their fears sounded far-fetched.

This year, I witnessed the bonfire being built by the employees of the man who owns the field, who also happens to run a nearby waste disposal plant, where he deals with rubbish for the local council. You may know that some of the rubbish taken away from us householders ends up, at some stage, in outside processing plants… Oh, for goodness sake. This is too much, isn’t it?

One of the people who has been begging me for years to look into all this is a well-respected independent councillor.