By: Blonde Two

The other night I had a bit of an experimentation session.  We Blondes like our plans and systems but, just once in a while, it is good to break free from your self made rules and regulations and try something a little bit different.

Now, for most adventurers, I am guessing that “something a little bit different” would involve either jumping off something very high, surviving freezing temperatures or going somewhere that nobody else has ever been (tricky that one as lots of people have now been to most places).  Did you notice the TV trailers for a program about the “never been seen by man” wildlife in Burma?  Well, here is a news flash … it has been seen by man now … Maybe next time we find something that has “never been seen by man”, we should leave it like that (just a thought!)  Don’t these people know anything about quantum physics and the “observer effect” – it is all to do with particles and waves and slits.

Anyway, I have digressed almost completely.  My “something a little bit different” did not involve heights, cold or the absence of people.  I decided that I would lay the fire upside down (read that carefully or else you will have me roasting like a chestnut).

Mr Blonde Two have a kind of quiet rivalry about fire lighting.  Without actually saying so, I am convinced that my years of Guiding and Scouting plus living with a solid fuel Rayburn as a child have left me in the position of being the best fire lighter in the family. Six-Foot-Blonde, who is coming home soon, would argue with this, he wasn’t very old when I bought him his first axe and told him to get on with chopping the firewood.

Like all good Guides, I was taught to lay a fire from the bottom up – paper, kindling, sticks, logs (never fire lighters).  This conventional configuration makes a lot of sense to my Blonde brain, after all, fire goes uphill doesn’t it?  The upside down fire is just that, it is the wrong way up – all you need to do is to put everything in the wrong place.  This sounds simple but you have no idea how difficult I found this.  A life-engrained system, it would appear, is a very tricky one to break out of.

It is quite possible that both Granny (Guide Commissioner) and Baden Powell were turning in their graves as I burnt the rule book.  The photos below show, however, that the experiment did work.  (Harry the Jack will only bother to come over to a fire once he is surely that it is correctly lit).

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The more observant amongst you will have noticed that a few stray pieces of paper managed to find their way underneath some of the wood instead of on top of it.  It would appear that, in the process of burning the rule book, one can find new, even deeper rules to break!