Have you ever started a fire?I went to sleep with candles burning - woke up to a circle of flame on the rug. Thought, "Tits. Better put the rug in the bath and turn the taps on." TIP: Don't put a burning rug into a fibre glass bath. I caused about £5000 of damage to the house and was coughing up smoky black phlegm for a few weeks. Can you beat that?
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rob, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 17:48)
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The Terror of TealightsApologies in advance for length....
Last summer I was camping with a few mates up in Scotland. One campsite couldn't provide us with an electricity supply so we couldn't use our trusty cage lamp.
Not wanting to sit in the tent playing cards in the dark and cold, off my mate popped to the local Tescos returning with a crate of beer and a bag of tealights.
We artfully arranged the tealights on a plastic dinner plate, placed it in the porch of the tent and lit it. Cue about an hour of happy warm and lit card playing.
The trouble started when a squadron of suicidal crane-flies entered the tent and began to dive head first into the tealights, thus causing a wick effect allowing the flames from adjacent tealights to amalgamate into small infernos.
Now molten candle wax doesn't burn at the normal sort of temperatures you find in your average tealight, but the aforementioned infernos generated enough heat to get the wax burning. This caused flames about a foot high (in a tent porch about 5 feet high). Noticing this, and the fact that we were all sat the wrong side of our raging fire to get to the exit, we decided to put the flames out the most logical way - by pouring Tennents on them!
This was a serious mistake resulting in 4 foot high flames - remember the tent roof is 5 feet high - of course we'd forgotten about the chip pan effect of pouring water on fat fires. After about 2 seconds of frenzied swearing I forcefully booted the plate, flames and all, out the door and onto the grass where it burned peacefully.
Close inspection of the scene after it had all gone quiet revealed a hole the size of a tealight in the centre of the plastic plate, several tealights moulded to the plate and a fair few holes in the groundsheet.
Just for laughs, the next night we assembled as many tealights as possible on a disposable barbeque and lit it. Outside the tent. The tealights burned hot enough to weld their little metal casings to the metal grill of the barbeque, which became decidedly bent in several places!
I now have a (quite rational I feel) fear of tealights.
(, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 19:25, Reply)
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