Crazy World of Arthur Brown

I found a new way of lighting a fire this morning. Well, it’s not strictly speaking new, I’m sure people have been doing it for years and I have read about it but it was new to me. I was trying to light the fire in the usual way, home made tinder on a leaf and sparks from the Fire Steel, normally the tinder catches and a small flame is produced, from this I light some dried grass and so on until I’m sitting back with a cup of tea and warm feet. It was probably the rain and the mist that stopped this working today; either that or I had messed up making the tinder. In either event I could not get the fire going, occasionally the tinder would flare up but the grass would not catch. In the end I was left with a very delicate ember of glowing tinder about the size of half a five pence piece on the leaf. I carefully transferred this piece of tinder to the charred end of one of yesterday’s logs and sandwiched it in place with a piece of charcoal that I had previously made. My gently blowing onto the ember of tinder, most of which blew away; I encouraged a small spot on the charred log to start glowing. Over the course of about a minute I continued to blow and with each breath the area of log that was glowing expanded. An orange glow that expanded on every breath, I assume that the underside of the charcoal was undergoing the same process. For soon a flame appeared only to go out again as soon as I had stopped blowing on it. Holding the dried grass over the charcoal and log ensured, a few breaths later, that the grass caught light.

Hugely satisfying experience


Gotta rush


bye