A local policeman comes home to his wife in Stone Town.
“Fatma, you won’t believe what happened today, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Oh yes dear? What happened ?”
“I came across two men down by the beach. One of them was drinking battery acid and the other was eating fireworks!”
“Drinking battery acid and eating fireworks! What did you do to them?”
“I charged one and let the other off.”

And from here, dear reader, we make a small but perfectly segued jump into more fireworks and the celebration of revolution day in Zanzibar. January12, the day when Zanzibar commemorates throwing off the shackles of Arab dominance under the Sultan of Oman in 1964. A shame about the thousands of local Arabs killed in reprisals in the immediate aftermath, but that’s another less celebratory story. The only documentary evidence appears to have been shot by an Italian film crew with subsequent speculation as to its authenticity. The local Indian shopkeeper who stopped to show me the film on his mobile was clear in his head what happened over those few days. You can make up your own mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHqEXc3u6So

Anyway, we went down to the beach to see the fireworks from the end of the jetty. All very ooh and aah. Stone Town about 6km away all lit up in sparkly puffs of light and, wait, what are those long, lazy arcs of red lights stretching into the evening sky? There’s more and more of them, and that staccato sound? Paka paka paka. Of course. Tracer bullets. Ho ho. Those cheeky chappy soldiers letting of live ammunition again. Wouldn’t want to be in a fishing boat anywhere within a kilometre or so of that. Ouch.

Try and buy these fireworks

The more observant amongst you might also have noticed that we have changed the blog’s header to a bright and breezy shot of Stone Town. Nadine thinks my face is scaring off followers to our blog. So, here’s looking forward to a flood of new bloggy visitors to our site. Let’s see if we can push that monthly ‘viewer’ tally up to double figures.