Not exactly a house...
It was a bland spring afternoon as I sat on the floor in the living room with nothing but a lit candle in front of me, a box of tissues beside me, and a black television screen glaring at the back of my head; so I, being the outstanding specimen of human intelligence that I am, decided to alleviate my boredom by combining my resources or, in other words, setting a piece of tissue paper on fire. What resulted from this was, at first, a brain completely at a loss for what to do, then, a confused and alarmed grandmother and a rather nasty smell, and finally, a few seconds later, a myself with a flaming tissue in my hand making a mad dash for the kitchen sink. Cue panic and fear that my mother would kill me/laugh at me.

Turns out it was not extremely bad, though it looked very nasty and had a ridiculously long recovery period.


*insert length joke here*

P.S.
(Mreek, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 17:00, Reply)

Haybarns...
Once a few years ago I worked all summer on a local farm (yes I'm the rural type).
I was sitting outside a grain silo in the sun listening to the radio awaiting the next load of grain to turn up when I noticed on the horizon a plume of smoke rising from the direction of the farms hay store some two miles away. I radioed my boss to tell him about it and we all drove over there to find the barn, several tons of hay and the spare forklift truck mightly ablaze. To be honest it looked very impressive until my boss started panicing because stored right next to this blazing inferno were about 10 - 20 two ton bags of amonia. Que much frantic running about, dragging over-heating bags of amonia away from the blaze.
The police found out later that two local kids had been lighting bits of hay and throwing them at each other...
(Biromunch, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 16:43, Reply)

My fire story, a long one too...
It all started one Monday morning. I was a dole scrounger at the time so I was enjoying a lie in. In my half awake/half asleep state I could hearing crackling and smell smoke, but I assumed it was somebody outside having a bonfire. I could also hear my family downstairs, going about their usual monday morning business, so I assumed all was well..

...Until the crackling got louder. So I leaned over, and without getting out of bed, poked my head out of the door to see what was going on.

The airing cupboard was on fire, and I mean a proper fire, with two foot flames leaping out the side of the door.

Cue me, flying out of bed as fast as I've ever done in my life, while shouting something along the lines of 'Oh mother dear... there appears to be a conflagration in our airing cupboard'. I didn't even get dressed properly, so I had to wait for the firemen with nothing on my feet, a pair of paint ridden jogging bottoms, and a moth-eaten old lumberjack shirt. I looked a right twat.

Five minutes later, the firemen turned up, and then spent another five minutes messing about before they decided to enter the house. Eventually they had the fire out, but that wasn't enough, oh no. They had to open all the upstairs doors and windows, put a huuuge fan at the front door and blow all the smoke out of the house. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but it left a right fucking mess upstairs.

The bathroom was the worst hit, everything had turned the same shade of grey, and I mean everything. You know that episode of Mr Bean, where he decorates by blowing up a can of paint? Well it was like that... but grey.

Half an hour later, some nosey journo and a photographer turn up from the local rag, and photograph me and my sister looking glum next to the smouldering remains of the airing cupboard. Never made it into the paper though.

In the afternoon, our insurance company sent round a cleaning company to start sorting out the damage, which was nice. They took away my PC, and decided that the smoke had damaged it beyond repair, so the insurance company coughed up and I got a shit hot new one, which was also quite nice.

Oh, and the reason for the fire? At first, faulty electrics were blamed, but it later emerged that some ten minutes before the fire, my old mum was reading the meter in the airing cupboard. Now, I know for a fact that the daft old mare read the meter with a lighter, bless her. No, we didn't have gas at all in the house, but some six inches above said meter is a rack full of towels. It doesn't take Columbo to figure out what the fuck happened.

I bought her a torch soon afterwards.

No apologies for length. You love it.
(jimi.vicious regrets criticising the American electoral system!, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 16:36, Reply)

oh and
when my older brother was at uni in ireland (coleraine), he went out for the night with his g/f. coming back to his lovely house on the beachfront, he thought he was seeing things. or rather not seeing things, given that the house had just disappeared.

closer inspection revealed a black, smoking wreck that looked a lot better blended into the night.

his housemate had gotten completely stoned and had decided that the fire would look a lot better out of the fireplace and in the middle of the floor. so he had picked it up and moved it. or to be more accurate, picked up various flaming pieces of wood which had promptly ignited the entire house. he had then legged it.

my brother was reasonably forgiving, until he realised the twunt had never bothered to go in to sign the tenancy agreement and so the landlord was holding him responsible for the damage...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 16:00, Reply)

Neatly avoiding my own incendiary tales
I remember one New Year's party in a friend's house in suburban Cork, when - quite drunk and about to replace his sitting room carpet - he gave us the go ahead to use deodorant to write, in flame, on his carpet. For some reason we voted on GFY, for Go Fuck Yourself. Not very witty, but when the drink is in...

As we stood drinking and smugly contemplating the huge burning letters on the carpet in front of us, we heard the stairs, and realised his wife was coming back down. A brief, terrified silence before she opened the sitting room door, and to our surprise uttered "Cool! Now do a huge Crow!"
( WhoElse I'm what Willis was talking about, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 15:35, Reply)

i'm the firestarter, twisted firestarter...
not me, but a schoolfriend named matt.

now matt was one of a big group of 18 year old lads who went camping together. after the consumption of many beers, and the carrying out of many utterly gruesome lad-ly activities (shagging the blow-up sheep, shagging the real surrounding sheep, pissing into the stream below their tents, bbq-ing each other's effluent "to see what colour it would go" - what fucking colour does anything go when you bbq it for god's sake?), matt staggered into the tent, took his jeans off to go to bed, caught his foot in them, and landed heavily on his arse.

which landed on the firestarter.

which caused a small jet of flame to burst out of it.

which burned a rather large hole in his calvins and virtually sealed his asshole closed when it scarred over.

9 years on and i still can't hear that prodigy song without chuckling.

EDIT - why do so many of my posts contain gross details about men shitting themselves? must be a manchester thing...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 15:04, Reply)

I almost burned down my halls of residence
I had a curling iron that I'd bought in Canada. Instead of using a proper adapter I just bent the prongs and plugged it in. As it was heating up I went to the kitchen to chat to someone. When I smelt smoke I rushed back to my room to find it glowing bright red and my shelf on fire. Something to do with 110v in Canada versus 220v in England. Details, details.

Someone on my floor managed to put out the fire with an extinguisher (amazing, those dusty things actually do work), but there was loads of mess and fire alarms and panic, etc.

I didn't care about the room, I'm just glad I didn't burn my hair with it.
(Peelmytangerines, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 15:00, Reply)

i burnt my house down (well only the kitchen really)
Was in the late 80's and we didn't have one of those fancy temperature controlled deep fat friers. We had nice big frier that went on the cooker ring. I dicided to make some chips after school and put the frier on. Then I proceeded to completely forget about the frier and pop round to a friends house to borrow a geography book. Upon my return I walked in through the back door to find the kitchen merrily ablaze. I ran to the phone (leaving the hall door open so the smoke could get around the entire house that bit easier. nice touch!) and rang the firebrigade. I gave my name and address to the operator. I'll never forget what the operator then said as I stood in the hallway trembling like a dog shitting with smoke billowing down the hall.....the actual words are ingrained in my mind forever and they were, 'could you give us directions as to how to get there?'. My oh my.
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 14:33, Reply)

Great Balls on Fire
A "friend" of mine, who was minding his little brother and sister whilst the parents holidayed in Corfu, noticed a small ember remaining on the wick of a candle he'd just blown out before going to bed. Too tired to extinguish it he figured it would burn itself out anyway.
He awakes a while later to find the entire opposite wall of his room engulfed in flame. He makes a pathetic attempt to put it out with the cup of cold tea on his bedside table, but to no effect. He ran in to his siblings room and ushered them outside, calling on a neighbour to mind them and alert the fire brigade. Against all advice he ran back inside to see if he could salvage anything/heroically put the fire out. Alas, he found the entire upper level of the house succumbing to the firey wrath.
Crestfallen and slightly delerious from smoke inhalation, he stumbled outside to discover his entire street had congregated outside, watching the flames turn a lifetime to dust.
Life could not get any worse for my sorry friend. Or so he thought. He felt a tap on his shoulder, it was his neighbour. A word of consolation perhaps? Not quite.
He asked my mate if he'd like a pair of trousers. Only then did he realise he was standing in a crowd of 35 people watching his parents house burn down with nowt but a small, cropped style t-shirt on, barely covering his belly button, his singed scrotal sack swaying slowly in the breeze.
(Smell eep!, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 14:24, Reply)

Confession time
I was 8, I think. Me and some mates had just discovered a large box of matches, and probably felt much the same way the early cavemen did about the new magic we could just create on demand. We experimented by setting fire to various things - books, ants, the usual kids stuff, but nothing seemed to assuage our lust for huge brightly flaming things. Then I remembered the bottle of Meths in our garage. And a mate remembered the recent news story about bush fires in Australia or somewhere. Then another mate realised it hadn't rained for bleedin' ages and the field of grass down near his house was really really dry..... Armed with a bottle of meths and several matches we headed off to see if we could create our own bush fire.

We succeeded. We'd all scarpered long before the police arrived, and the first of the 5 fire engines. Took a whole for "heat" to die down but they never caught us, and they never will BWahahahahahahaha.
(yesyesyes, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 14:16, Reply)

Exploding film container curtain horror
Its fun and simple to make, just get on old 35mm film container, puncture a hole through the lid and push two bits of wire through the hole and seal any gaps with blu-tac.

Bend the wires so the ends point at each other with a small gap in between them ('bout 5mm should do it). Attach the other ends to the contacts of a piezo unit ripped from a used clicky flintless lighter, and you ready to go.

Get the deoderant that you got last christmas as part of a toiletries set, you know the one that smells like tramps piss, or lynx atlantis if you can't find that particular brand. Spray a short burst into the cannister and quickly seal it with the lid wire combo. Aim away from your face and click the lighter piezo. All being well the deoderant should ignite with an audible pop propelling the cannister a short distance.

Now if you don't get it right, like i did, you'll proabably keep spraying deoderant into the cannister and trying to re-ignite it until it does. This is approximately after you've emptied half the can into the incendiary bastard. Then instead of an audible pop, you get a door rattling bang, and instead of it going a short distance it will flying across your Uni halls room before embedding itself in the blackout curtains Unis seems to bedeck all student rooms with.

It's then with horror that you will realise that all the residue from the half can of atlantis is merrily burning away with a bright blue flame out the back of the cannister directly onto curtains you do not own.

You'll probably scream like a girl and have visions of dying in the ensuing inferno, or jus probably run and try and put the fiery twunt out, hopefully without too much damage. With a bit of luck your room will smell like melted draylon and lynx atlantis for the rest of the semester.

The following year I graduated to trying the above with pringles tubes, doesn't work as well.
(northern seth back is giving him jip again, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 13:49, Reply)

Idiot
I was bet by someone I couldn't burn a hole in a 20 pound note whilst it was across the back of my hand. Here's a tip: you can't, the heat is dispelled by your arm faster than it can build up on the paper. I DID manage to set fire to my arm and have an oh so attractive scar to show for it.
(DustyD, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 13:43, Reply)

Fire Breathing
During my first stint in Alnwick in the mid-eighties I was part of the hippie/rocker/musicians set in the town. A good bunch. One of them was a lad called Mark and he lived miles out on the moors in a small-holding with his GF, Sue. Mark was a bit of a dodgy guy, a bit of a wheeler-dealer always on the lookout for an opportunity to make a quick buck but was a great bloke just the same. Mark decided to use the place he was living at to throw a small music festival. A lot of things in my life start this way - a daft idea in a pub that somehow takes on a life of it's own. If we knew how much hard work for little reward was involved we would have never done it. But anyway, we were young and stupid and nobody told us what we were trying to do was impossible given our resources so we just went ahead and did it.

I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of how we organised this festival, I'll just skip to the fire-breathing part.

On the first night we had number of bands on our one and only stage and Mark came over to me (I was doing lights) and asked me if I could do some juggling or something during the change-over of bands to keep the natives from getting restless. I was a bit pissed by now, too pissed to juggle, and I had a brainwave. I'd do some fire-breathing! I'd seen it done and I knew the principles. It couldn't be that hard could it?

So I beetled off to one of the barns, grabbed some paraffin and made a flaming torch. Then I decanted some paraffin into a bottle, too a swig and blew..... WOOOOOOOSSSHHHHHH! Massive fucking flames! Hey this was easy! So I then drunkenly made my way to the main stage and put on a bit of a show. It went down a storm. I was having a great time and so was the crowd (I do like showing off once in a blue moon...). Anyway, at the end of my show another band started up and the crowd headed back to watch them.

As I was packing up, these three very drunk lads came over.

"Man! That was awesome! How do you do it? Can you teach us!!!"

I explained that trying it as pissed as they were wasn't a good idea and that the paraffin tasted vile but the were insistent. As I was in a good mood and I showed them how to do it using water to practise with and then allowed them a couple of quick shots each. They were over the moon.

A couple of weeks later I was chatting to Mark. He'd just come back from Tyneside where he'd met these three guys and was killing himself laughing. What I didn't know at the festival is that these guys weren't drunk. They were tripping out of their brains on LSD! For the last two weeks they'd been telling everyone they met that they'd met a wizard at the festival and he'd waved his arms and they'd breathed fire man!

Laugh! I almost choked.....

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 13:39, Reply)

Wedding Fire
My Aunt and Uncle decided to get married. Me and my brother being the cutest of of all the kids, were named as page boys. At 11 years old I was not too happy about it. My brother aged 9 was enjoying the attention but when the bride and groom prepared too depart fro their honeymoon my brother was ejected from the limelight. He had a cunning plan though. Checking the coast was clear, he grabbed the souvenir matches from a table and went outside to genie the whole box. The miniscule flame did not warrant much attention. He needed to get magnify his inferno, and fast. With a quick peek he found some old leaves, good work bro i thought. Now the flames are 4ft high but this is still not enough for even a quick peek from anyone resembling a grown up. But all is not lost, my cunning brother has seen enough MacGuyver to know how to make yourself better off from any given situation. He throws on the flames an old dried up wooden fence. The flames follow his command, up the fence to the dried ivy along the metal fence. Now we are cooking with gas! The flames traverse the back garden at incredible speed ultimately reaching their desired target, the coup de gras, the pinnacle of his plan. My genius brother knew that once the flames reached the back corner of the garden it would combust the small petrol cannister, in turn exploding the old rusty oil barrel. The resulting force would destroy one side of the shed, exposing the gas cannisters. Once the flames reached the sawdust floor it was a matter of time. Too anyone bar the consumate professional, the timing is way too hard to judge. My brother, belonging to the upper echelons of the Arsonists Serenade Squad, was one of the best at perfect timing. Just as the first gas cannister exploded, shooting across the garden, the groom come rushing around the corner with a bucket of water. It was joyful to watch such a perfectionist at work. The missile connected with his left parietal bone causing blunt force trauma. The surrounding area seemed to fall silent, everyone looking left in unison with my brother simply standing there holding the first match he had picked up that day, blackened and crooked, embodying everything to do with the dangers of fire, but to him, it was a magic wand.
His family blamed my brother for the incident, i do not know why, he was just being a good son and listening to his loving grandmother and the priest, it was after all her who said he was not good enough for her and she would be off without him, but she would not leave him...
well till death do they part.
Little did they know my brother was a genius in fire related crime and no one would ruin his day in his special black suit with bow tie.
The funeral was a week later. All went well.

Magic
( MagicallyInept Bored Sig., Mon 7 Nov 2005, 12:46, Reply)

I have installed a gas hob
by myself without the proper tools for the job. We have to turn the gas off as soon as we've used it because it leaks.

We also have a solid fuel rayburn in the kitchen - yes, open flame near leaky gas.

So if I never post here again, you know what's happened....
(teasus likes tea, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 11:57, Reply)

Surely this is top of the league?!
I am the master of mass destruction... on two separate occasions of hell-fire, I am a true paramaniac, the rest of the time just a bog standard maniac...
1) Was about 5 years old and little helpful old me decides that on a cold, wet, windy morning that I shall single handedly warm the house... I collect various lighters/matches/fire lighters etc etc... Yee haa I think to myself as I cunningly plot and plan to warm the vast expanse of house (9 bedrooms, not a small challenge for someone of my size and intellect)... Here goes, this is no ordinary fire.... it's heeeowge.... I start the burning, aided by some turps or similar... damp logs, damn it, but I don't give in, with enough fire lighters and copious quantities of newspaper and boring books I achieve my quest to warm... unfortnuatly, even though the flames were high blah blah blah the smoke was an added bonus, the damp logs were angry, soon the whole house was filled with smoke and the adults choked their way down the stairs, there's no catchy punch line to this storey, lets face it...I'm boring!

2) Fires outside the house can too be fun.... off I trot, hmmmmmm wow, sticks... what are sticks good for?... burning of course... where better to make a small child like fire than under the shelter of this green thing in the garden.... beautiful little fire... then to my utter astonishment "Mummy" comes screaming like a bannchie from la maison... "what the hell are you doing you little shit" or words to that effect came spitting from her devil lips... "run away from the fire NOW", yeah whatever, oh ok, spot the deliberate mistake... my green shelter was the oil tank, yes, whoops, bang bang etc etc. My mother was furoius as this was the one and only supply to her beloved Aga, no nice turkey on Christmas day for me then... I however think that it's rude to blame a sweet little child with long blonde hair and big green eyes for such innocent activities... parents that smoke should not leave, under any circumstances, forms of parafinalia around the house to "lure" and "tempt" with, it's not big and it's certainly not clever!

I'm still in trouble!.................. HELP!!
(Oli_egg, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 10:50, Reply)

I am the god of hellfire and I bring you....
When I was around 8 or 9 years old I went to my friend's house across the road. For a while we played on his Amiga but soon grew weary and wandered to the garage for entertainment. Originally I think we were looking for an air rifle or something that legend had it was in there. Anyway we came across a case of aerosol cans and found some matches.
It was of course natural to create makeshift blow torches and exterminate the 'pests' of the garage in a blaze of glory. We were going after a mouse (we were only 8) under the cupboards but just scorched everything around instead. We then attempted to write our names and set fire to them - this didn't work. And then to burn his sister's dolls - this did work. At the end the garage had the odd smell of a bouquet of flowers mixed with acrid burning plastic - surely the smell of victory.
We thought we had got away with it, my parents came to pick me up and were just walking up the drive when, oh noes, my friends mum went, "hang on, James (his name), why have you not got any eye-brows". The fire had singed them all off!
I was grounded for a month :(:(:(
( entropy_uk www.andrewtatham.com/blog, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 10:14, Reply)

australian kids
I grew up in australia, and used to have relatives up north in brisbane. Being 8 year old kids, and having heard from the government that cane toads are a pest and should be destroyed, we managed to procure ourselves a can of petrol. Which we duly showered on cane toads and set them alight. Was most fun, after dark, watching a flaming toad bounce around the garden setting fire to various things on the way.

Wasn't as much fun as putting them in plastic bags and playing cricket with them though.
(something clever about willies and sex wee, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 10:07, Reply)

anybody that knows me knows i like fire....
I'm a fully badged, time served, pyromaniac and during the course of my lifetime of discovery have set many an item ablaze, including:

the lounge light when i was about 7 (but that was really my sisters fault because she wouldn't give me her skipping rope so i had to snatch it from her...she let go, rope whipped up behind me, smashed the lightbulb and set the shade alight. I have tried to recreate this again, without success. Dad wasn't happy)

A hay barn. Myself and a few friends ("Hi, Andy, Wayne etc!") created a quite spacious room inside a pile of bales. We were all sitting in there, marvelling at how clever we had been when i decided that all we needed to complete the scenario was a small fire. Doh! You cannot possibly conceive the speed at which the fire spread, nor how fast five young lads gave it toes away from that barn. You could see the flames all the way home....

The same few friends and myself went camping a few years later, at a local farm. We set up the tent and lit a small fire. I was in charge of fuel as it was too much effort for anybody else, so i went in search. Luckily the farm had an outhouse with some logs, kindling and paper so i asked the farmers wife(? not sure if she was his wife or the sheepdog, anyway, i digress...) if i could take some. "Sure help yourself" was the reply. Imagine her surprise when by the morning her entire supply of logs and so on that she was storing for the winter lay in ashes around our campsite!! That was one of the biggest fires I have ever made....

Last one! [If you want to hear more, email me or mither B3ta to let me!] As I got older and more mature, so I eventually fooled a landlord into letting me rent one of his houses. The house was huge (er...actually still is - i didn't burn it down!) and had a small walled garden at the back. My girlfriend at the time and myself set about decorating and clearing rubbish, tidying the garden and general stuff like you do. there was so much rubbish, the only way to get rid of it was by fire (haha!!), so everything was piled high and set ablaze. This fire demonstrated the effect of combining close walls and dry rubbish - paint on the second floor windows started to burn away, a window on the first floor shattered and the kitchen window turned black. I was in the process of deciding whether to call the fire brigade or hang tight on the basis of "the fire surely cannot sustain itself for longer" when the decision was taken for me by the police who had seen the top of the fire from several streets away and assumed i needed help....lots of people not happy!!

Remember kids, fire isn't cool, it's hot. Practice using it whenever you can!

I have never been this long before and never will be again.
(downhill without brakes . It was the worst day of my life, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 8:46, Reply)

Melting skin
When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with fire.

One day, during the summer holidays when I was about 8, I decided that it would be a good idea to make a flaming catapult out of old lolly sticks and an elastic band.

After assembling my home made contraption I soon found out that lighting an elastic band was not a good idea when some of the molten rubber landen on the back of my hand and started to burn down through the skin.

I managed to run into the kitchen where my Mum ran my hand under water.

There was a lot of pain, but now I have a cool, round scar on the back of my hand - looks like someone has stubbed a cigarette on it.
(markymoo, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 8:38, Reply)

'Nother one
Not me but a mate - a much-disliked kid from his school turned up one day with no eyebrows and a hairline about three inches back from what it had been, and told the assembled masses that he'd been held down by big boys who'd set him on fire.

After the police got involved, it emerged that he'd been planning to build a mini-bomb for the usual ten-year-old reasons, and had decided the best way to do this was to get a big cardboad salt tin and scrape off the red stuff from the heads of dozens of matches. He'd got away with it for a surprisingly long time, until one day he'd been scraping away and the matchy stuff settled a little too vigorously, and up it had all gone.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Mon 7 Nov 2005, 3:00, Reply)

Chemistry
Once, in a chemistry lesson, I accidentally set a gas pipe on fire, I ran away assuming it was going to explode. Luckily it didn't, and my chemistry teacher appeared to extinguish it with his hands.

First post:)
( Didyoumissme1, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 2:52, Reply)

My Grandad has a history of setting fire to things
When he lived on a country estate (groundskeeper, not millionaire) he found a dead piglet, of which there were few. Unlike most normal people, he didn't call a vet or bury it, he burned it. In a glorious fire...in the middle of a forest. He's a bit mad him.
( Brown cow, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 2:42, Reply)

Flaming hair
A few months back, I was sitting in a fairly nice restaurant with candles on the tables. My parents had yet to arrive, and I was waiting around, when something possessed me to lean over the table to grab something on the other side. My hair went into the fire, and there was a few seconds of trying to put the fire out with my hands and generally looking like a spazz. There was no noise at all, though, and people just kept on eating and ignoring the flaming girl in the middle of the restaurant. Only the sushi chef noticed, and he looked at me like I was crazy for a few seconds, and went right back to making sushi.

Miraculously, my hair survived, and I didn't notice any difference at all when I next brushed it, like nothing had happened. Perhaps it was a hallucination.
(Fodqou, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 1:04, Reply)

Grill + Gas leak= Very bad thing.
Today, my father was trying to light the grill, but for some reason it wasn't working, so I went to help out. Someone had moved it, and now the flames wouldn't get more than an inch high, no matter how much gas was coming out. So, he told me to lean over the grill. I should've decided against it, but I did.

So, I was leaning over the grill watching the little flames that weren't getting any bigger, when my dad, in a moment of stupidity, turns the nozzle all the way. It turned out something was already cracked and gas was leaking, and it finally sparked. So, with the gas on full-blast, massive flames shoot up from the grill, and not just on the cooking surface but all over it, singing my face and shirt, and all the hair off of his arm, which had been under it.

What followed was a "Run away! Run away!" moment trying to escape the grill-fireball that was probably going to explode, and there was much tripping over plants and garden hoses. Eventually the fire went out and the grill didn't explode, but it did make a nice fireball. My shirt is ruined.
(Fodqou, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 0:58, Reply)

I'm a lucky bastard
living in a 300 year old farmhouse, we don't have central heating. Our only methods of heating are two wood burners and a solid fuel rayburn.

So I get to play with fire every single day. muhahahaha!
(teasus likes tea, Sun 6 Nov 2005, 23:54, Reply)

When I was fairly small
I liked to conduct slightly odd experiments. most were fairly harmless, unfortunately - at the worst a bit smelly.

One of them, however, involved flicking a metal watch strap across the half pushed in prongs of a plug. There was a loud bang and a flash, and all the lights went out.

Unfortunately, when the lights came on, the extension socket on my desk was fairly melted, and there were burn marks all around it, so I was unable to pretend it wasn't my fault the fuse blew.
(teasus likes tea, Sun 6 Nov 2005, 23:53, Reply)

I remember
the day the ice-cream van caught fire. The situation looked truly grim till all the local kids rallied round and chucked hot tea on the blaze, all the while grooving away to the strains of Coolio faintly audible from their ever-present stereo headphones. Their heroic actions saved the hour, and within a matter of weeks the ice-cream van was back to its normal self, tootling around the neighbourhood and playing its tinny travesties of the classics as if nothing had happened at all.

All went well until several years later, when a plague of fire-babies came to terrorise the neighbourhood; these horrendous beasts were lightning-fast little buggers that grew bigger anytime they heard Coolio songs, and whose babylike screams confused mothers who were otherwise repelled by their slowly-burning appearances. The fire-babies were eventually put out by Army helicopters spraying industrial-grade flame retardants over everything; despite their remedial properties, they were an absolute bugger to get out of the carpet, and nothing ever grew in our garden again. All this could have been avoided if those pesky kids hadn't wanked into their tea before using it to put out the blazing ice-cream van!

However, at the time I was oblivious to all this - I was busy losing my virginity to the princess of my last B3ta QOTW story....
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Sun 6 Nov 2005, 22:05, Reply)