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).
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!
Excellent. Certainly worth an astrakhan coat, Or two since, it seems, B1 and B2 are held together by the strong nuclear reaction (You know, the one involving the gluon – never an entirely serious particle) and according to the RR Certainty Principle unamenable to separate consideration.
Do you want to be different? I mean really, radically different? You’re sure now? How about being boring? Undifferentiated meteorological info combined with the state of your respective navels. Bet you can’t. It isn’t in your natures. Two tickets to the next Phillip Glass opera says you’d spontaneously combust if you tried.
Decades have passed since I lit an open fire. Quiet rivalry, you say. Surely this is a gender-defining act. Like taking out the dustbin when it’s monsooning. Look, I’m an unreconstructed feminist of the worst kind but there are certain things… Replacing a fuse in the old-fashioned sort of consumer unit, say. Shaky ground, B2. For both of us.
Right then – today I had to look up “gluon” which I think I understood and Philip Glass which I am sure that I didn’t. Did I mention that we can’t resist a challenge? Please could you define the “rules” of this challenge more clearly – do you want a boring comment or a whole blog post?
You are right, I am twitching at the thought and would probably rather cross the Dartmeet stepping stones (a granite nemesis) naked and barefoot.
Daughter, (High Horse – teacher) has two favourite sayings:
“Let me do that Dad”.
“I think you’ll find it better if you do it my way”.
Only very occasionally do I stand my ground and rebel against the latter.
As a daughter and a high-horse myself, I feel that I must agree with her sentiments except that I have never lost my childhood conviction that my Dad knows everything about everything.
excuse my trespassing on your sod, as it were:
you have probably concluded there must be a scientific explanation for this – and I sense it has nothing to do with Heisenburg – or Newton, even.
as an equally widely acknowledged master of combustion, I was sceptical about Morsø’s stove lighting instructions, which appeared to defy your cosmic law, but have much in common with your new experience. They do work, somewhat – with a stove or chimney grate.
but not with a campfire, I’ll warrant – unless you use a complete Sunday Times at one go (less the glossy bits) – a far far better thing to do . . . .
quite which laws are at work here, I’d like to know (basic thermodynamics may help – maybe not)
my view, stubbornly held, despite raucous barracking, is that a fragment of firelighter is more globally environmentally efficient than paper – but, of course, not a patch on a curl of birchbark: that they work damp helps cement this conviction!
Hi Gimmer – you will find that we are very generous with our sod, feel free to trespass (unless you are a bauble thief). I rarely get to build camp fires nowadays (Dartmoor very sensibly doesn’t allow them) but feel that I must make an effort to do so next year in order to try the upside-down-theory out properly.
I will confess to using firelighters when I am in New Zealand, that and diesel soaked rags for the bonfire.
Called my bluff din’cha? You don’t seriously believe I want you to come up with a boring post, do you? And you with all that advanced education. Read backwards, if you like, it was a lumbering attempt to compliment you on your powers of invention and illumination, plus a style of writing that I haven’t yet figured out but which I may well end up plagiarising. Prose with an admixture of oral stuff; like one of those black dresses – a form of clothing that is taking on semiotic tendencies in our exchanges – shot through with occasional strands of glitter.
What worries me is I suspect you’re perfectly capable of writing an outstandingly boring piece as an intellectual exercise. A piece that would anaesthetise 99% of your readers and would leave me rootling through the tundra, laying bare the technique. Can’t have that.
The Americans have a saying: I shoulda stood in bed. Meaning I ought to have employed my time better. Next: Jack Russells I have known.
Surely a double bluff from a pair of Blondes? A challenge is a challenge and I was once taught that the only correct response to a compliment (spotted once we had listened to Mr Glass’ compositions) is “thank you”.
Thank you.
We would love to be plagiarised and can even spell it without help. I wonder if we would spot ourselves in your mirror.
You are mistaken however, about the little black dresses – ours are shot through with Dartmoor heather.
Quite right – double blonde bluff. Can we take it as read from now on that my stuff is always vouvoyer not tutoyer.
My cherished title from a spoof on Readers’ Digest from years ago was: “How my dog taught me to pray”.
Errr….concerned…this could be a case of safety taking a day off. Mum my always told me not to put lit paper on top, as sometimes it takes off up the chimney…and if you haven’t had it swept for a while..well…..just saying!
And I can confirm from experience calling the fire brigade can be embarrassing, as I learnt when I set fire to mum’s back field last spring. The worst bit was I had just been sailing and was looking far from my best when TWO fire engines, with associated cuties turned up. Anyway I digress.
Remember safety never takes a day off because danger never sleeps….
With very, very dry wood it will work, but it’s an inefficient trick. Burning paper up the flue a hazard? I don’t think so.
Diesel soaked rags indeed! A spoonful of sugar !
But had real problems lighting my tiny cooker when I spent a night on the blighted heath – the matches must have come out of the Ark with Noah – dry, but a whole boxful refused to light, until – relief by the gallon – the very last one. A night on the blighted heath followed by a tea-less breakfast of cold, raw veggie sausages would have been just a tad too much!
Never (unless you really like a challenge) buy matches from Lidl. Not only do they refuse to light but the heads fly off and spontaneously combust on the floor.
Ouch! Did you light it upside-down, by the way? (I mean, standing on your head?)