Fire!We were all in my aunt's kitchen at the back of her huge rambling Victorian house. I was only small and had wandered off to go to the loo, but given up after finding the hall full of smoke. "That was quick," my mum said after a few minutes. "Yes - it's all smoky," I replied.
I've never seen adults move so fast.
So, like my cousin who'd managed to set fire to the roof, tell us your fire stories.
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chthonic, Thu 3 Nov 2005, 9:11)
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Sun, Sea, Sand, FireMy father is a major-league pyromaniac ( a trait he has passed on to me ) who uses any excuse to make a fire. The bigger and smokier the better. The need to dispose of things usually gives him the best reasons, be it a pile of branches, a tire found in a hedge, or a wendy house beyond repair.
Once the whole family went for a day at the beach with picnic and what-not. And there right beside our towel and piknick-hamper-delineated private territory we find a huge congealed lump of black stuff, with bits of tarpaulin, pebbles, sea weed, ends of frayed rope and other crap all glued into one unsightly mass. This thing, about the size of a tractor tire, presumably started its life as an oil slick and ended it as a lump of nautical blue-tack that just acuumulated more and more random crap.
Once we had set it on fire it burned magnificently, producing huge amounts of pitch black toxic smoke -- as I have mentioned, it was mostly hydrocarbon in nature. Others on the beach decided to move their bases discreetly away rather than start a fight. It was also obvious that nothing short of an airport fire crew could put out the hellish inferno. Anyway, the fire burned down and ended, as all fire sadly do and I noticed on closer inspection that some molten rivulets of plastic "lava" had run out of the fire and down the beach before solidifying into something resembling bakelite. I broke off the tip of one of these lava flows and put it in a plastic bag to remind me of this happy day on the beach.
On the way home I stuck my nose into the bag to admire my trophy and must have breathed some of the air that was in it which by this time was laced with a toxic cocktail of gas. The result was that within three minutes I was hit by a headache so bad as I have never experienced before or after. I suffered in agonising silence all the way home and then went straight to bed.
I wonder what those fumes did to my young and underdeveloped brain.
Apologies for length. I should be debugging a program but found something better to do.
(, Thu 3 Nov 2005, 13:23, Reply)
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