Fireworks For Sale in Waterloo

A rocket is the simplest thing in the range to buy and the easiest thing in it to buy badly, which is a combination worth a page of its own.

Twenty-nine of them, in two shapes

Rockets and Rocket Packs holds 29 items, and the category name is doing real work. Some of those are single rockets and some are packs of several sold as one thing, and that difference matters considerably more than the number does.

A single rocket is one event. It goes up, it does what it does, and that is the whole of it. Buy four singles and you have four events with four pauses in them, and the pauses are longer than anybody imagines when they are standing in a shop. A pack is a set chosen to go up together or in quick succession, which means the pauses have already been thought about by somebody else.

Why the packs usually win

Height is the thing rockets are bought for, and height is also what makes them unforgiving: a rocket is over in a couple of seconds and there is nothing to look at while the next one is being got ready. A pack solves the timing problem by removing the decision from the person holding the torch in the dark, which is exactly when nobody wants to be making decisions.

Singles earn their place in two situations. One is the finish, where a single large rocket is the full stop after everything else. The other is a night with no display at all behind it — a result, a birthday, a reason to send one thing up and go back inside.

Where they sit in an evening

Rockets are the one part of the range that people who were not invited still see. Everything else happens at the height of a garden; a rocket happens at the height of the street. That is worth knowing both ways round — it is why they open and close most evenings, and it is why an evening built entirely from them is one everybody gets and nobody can quite follow.

The counter will tell you which of the 29 are singles and which are packs, and that one question narrows the choice faster than reading every name in the category.