This year has been the quietest lead-up to bonfire night ever.

We haven’t had the usual experience of living in what sounds like a war zone for six weeks beforehand, with explosions and that weird crackling noise that sounds like your windows are falling in.

I don’t mind fireworks in the right place and in small doses. When I was growing up, people let them off only on bonfire night. We may have had a few bangers thrown in dustbins and stuck up car exhausts beforehand, but you didn’t find yourself cowering under the table amid a barrage of mortar rockets and wishing you had an Anderson shelter.

And people didn’t let them off on birthdays. I resist the temptation to let our entire village know when I have a landmark birthday, as some people do, launching 50 scud missiles from their back garden.

Thankfully, with tighter restrictions on sales, that doesn’t seem to happen as much. But while there have been fewer fireworks, those on sale are a lot bigger and a lot louder.

Last year, I took a packet of small fireworks labelled ‘quiet’ to my friend’s bonfire party. If they were quiet I’d hate to have heard the loudest. Each one boomed like a supersonic jet, the noise echoing along my friend’s terraced street.

With all the complaints generated, you’d think someone would have invented a silent firework – after all, it’s the colour and spectacle we’re after. And it would be a blessing for all those poor dogs and cats who spend the night cowering under the bed.

Fireworks are bigger these days, too. Gone are the days of a few small rockets which your dad would stick in a sand-filled milk bottle, light with a long touch paper, and then reel back as if he’d released an A-bomb, and those individual Catherine wheels that got stuck after the first revolution.

Some of those on sale today are gigantic – I was fascinated by a huge barrel, which the assistant in Aldi told me was one firework. “It’s meant to be for the finale,” he said. I think Danny Boyle used it for the Olympics closing ceremony.

Fireworks don’t come cheap. You need a few for a decent party, and with small packs of rockets costing £20, it can soon rack up. If you really want to celebrate the saving of Parliament (are we mad?), make a few hot dogs, grab a glass of wine and pop outside to watch someone else burn a massive hole in their pocket.

There’s bound to be a pyrotechnic nutcase nearby trying to stage a bigger, better display than anyone in the North of England.