Dom Davis (The Blog)

Our little cottage is heated, in the main, by a wood burning stove. We get our wood from the Zoo (offcuts of the timber used to build the place) and have, until now, been burning stuff that was cut and stored a couple of years ago. The nice dry wood ran out recently and we’ve moved onto bits that have been on the ground for a couple of year and that have only just been cut and stored which means getting the fire going can be fun.

Normally I can get a fire started with 1 fire lighter but recently I’ve had occasion to use 2. Today I started with 1 and the fire promptly went out. As I only had two fire lighters left I thought I’d leave nothing to chance and put both of them in, relit the fire… and watched it go out again.

Given I didn’t fancy heading out to the shop to get more fire lighters I decided to try something else and see what we had in the house that was flammable and good for starting fires. The first thing that sprang to mind was nail polish remover, after all the side of the bottle does say ‘CAUTION EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE’.

Anyway, I liberally sprinkled some over the fire lighter box, put that in the fire and the chucked a bit more of the nail polish removed over the wood in the fire, applied the lighter and…

WHUMP!

When the say ‘extremely’ they mean it. There was a 2 foot diameter fireball, bits of ash blown about the place and a roaring fire in the stove (and out of the stove for a few seconds while some of the spilled nail polish remover burned out).

Tomorrow I’ll get some more fire lighters and spare my eyebrows