2 years ago, Alison bought me a present for my birthday which falls just after Christmas.
I remember going to Grace’s room to see it because it had been carried upstairs and hidden away and it was too heavy to carry downstairs unless there was 3 of us.
It was a ‘great British outdoor fire pit’.
It’s a cast-iron box that you can light an outdoor fire in and sit around and you can personalise each of the walls of the box.
It’s a truly beautiful and significant gift that should last the rest of my life.
1 wall is a rose and a thistle with the date that we first met and the date that we got married.
Another is a horse and a dog (animals have taken up huge amounts of our lives and have created amazing memories).
Another is a swim, bike, run Outlaw triathlon symbol (they had to get special permission to use the triathlon symbol) and the other is a basketball player and a football player, one to present me as a player and one to represent me as a coach for my son’s football team.
Hard to believe or understand a more significant and beautiful present but the point is that we’ve almost never used it.
Life is so busy, and evenings are so scattered that we’ve never had the chance to sit down, light a fire and have a chat (until last Saturday).
I had lit it a couple of times as a trial, but life has moved on in the last 2 years and kids have left home and space has opened up and vacuums have been created.
This is not a terrible thing, it’s just the way of things but now we have more time (at least a little bit) and Alison came back from the farm on Saturday evening and suggested that I light it.
Rosie was actually home from university and her and Louis used it later on and Callum was around, but it was far too cold for a 14-year-old to sit outside for more than 10 minutes.
But I lit the fire and we sat and talked and toasted marshmallows on the forks that one of my best friends, David and Brenda, had given to us ages ago.
The point though is that we create an unbelievable amount of invisible convenience and even though we think we’re doing something difficult; we’re not doing something difficult at all and so, Alison had bought (on a random trip to B&Q) a bag of coal that lights instantly that you just drop into your fire-pit, light the bag and the whole thing just burns for hours.
This is completely at odds with the fire-lighting skills that my Dad taught me when we got a log burner.
There is an art to lighting a fire (my paternal Grandmother knew this all too well) which is superseded now by the invisible convenience of buying a bag from B&Q.
But we had the bag and we’d bought it and it seemed like the easiest thing to do and so I lit it and sat and watched it.
First of all, there’s tons and tons less joy in just lighting a bag than there is in constructing a fire with paper and kindling and larger bits of wood and then coal.
There is a primal joy in getting a fire going, probably even better if you don’t use a match.
But when I lit the bag up it went to expose what was inside.
What was inside was coal (a special type with no smoke apparently) and dozens of firelighters.
Firelighters are of course a total aberration and an insult to the fire lighting man/woman but also not the best for the environment and in this bag the firelighters had all collected at the bottom and so it only lit a very few of the coals at one end of the bag.
And so, in the chase for convenience the fire bag manufacturers and all of us who buy it miss out on the opportunity of actually having the fire we set out to have because in fact what we want to do is chuck the bag on a log burner in our living room whilst in our pj’s and light it so that it doesn’t interrupt our boxset.
I think it misses the point but also creates the point that convenience is devastating both for the environment and probably for our mental health in the long-term.
We only had one bag and so the next time we light it I’ll do it the way my dad taught me.
Blog Post Number - 3229