Rekindling the flame

I USED to think log fires were romantic. North Queensland has cured me.

For a start, log fires in North Queensland are hot. Too hot. You might imagine you’re cold occasionally about this time of year, but you’re not. A woolly jumper is as efficacious as fire for warming purposes, and it will create less ash, fewer burns, better temper and no fetching and carrying.

It must be because I’m an ex-Pom that I have this troubled relationship with fires. In a country where ice can occasionally weld the windows shut, a fire seems like a good idea.

But here, it’s a bit like unsatisfactory sex: a lot of effort; and before, during and after, all you can wonder is whether it’s worth it.

I’ve been trying to light one. So far I have used an entire box of matches. Never mind that today’s boxes of matches contain fewer than the fingers and toes on your average married couple, and that they break off just below the head when you try to strike them, which doesn’t matter because they invariably sputter and die, anyway.

It would have been more efficient to use them as kindling, but then I’d have needed another bloody match to light them.

Eventually, of course, I could have ignited steel with the flame of my rage, but that was later.

First I screwed up several pages of the Townsville Bulletin as a foundation for an armful of twigs.

The Bullie burned a treat; so well that the twigs didn’t even notice it was there.

Then I remembered an old trick of my mother’s and plaited the newspaper into long… plaity things, which makes them last longer.

It did. My lengths of plaited newspaper will still be sitting in the grate when the last trump sounds and the dead awaken.

Fire is a real concern in newspaper offices. All that combustible material – wouldn’t take a minute for it to go up in smoke. I am thinking of suggesting to the editor that he archives the Bullie in my fireplace, where there’s not the remotest possibility of it igniting.

Like the logs. Logs in the Tropical North must be 80 per cent water, like people, because they don’t burn either. Eating them would be quicker.

The ants are already having a fair crack at it. Or they were when I carried them in. Since then they have migrated to me because, I assume, I am tastier, and easier to chew.

Someone once said the best way to start a fire with two pieces of wood was to make sure one of them was a match, but that’s rubbish. The best way to start a fire is to ensure that wood and paper don’t go anywhere near it. Kerosene, napalm, even nuclear fusion, offer more effective and quicker ways of lighting a fire.

Unless you’re out bush in the fifth year of drought with a city of three million people a few kilometres down wind. Then an angry look will do it.

But under controlled conditions — on demand — that’s a different story.

It’s what’s supposed to separate us from the animals – our ability to make fire.

My wife says they might have to make an exception in my case.

Didn’t I say? It was her fire I was lighting. Something I have been failing to do for some time now, as regular readers of this column will be aware. But I believe I may have detected the faint glow of a reluctant ember somewhere among the cinders.

Nobody move. Nobody breathe. Somebody fetch the kerosene…