Not me, this time, but Hay's sister, Michelle.
She lives next door, is a ceramicist and regularly does raku firings in a couple of insulated bins specifically for the purpose. The process uses wood shavings to develop the typical raku glaze in the firing.
One evening I went outside for a breath of fresh air while Hay was watching some stuff on TV that I wasn't the least bit interested in, and smelled the remnants of a wood fire. Hunting around, I found one of Michelle's raku firing bins, which was still quite warm and had obviously been used that day. I thought nothing more of it.
The next morning, Hay and I were on the patio and the smell of wood smoke was very powerful. Hay glanced at her sister's small studio and saw some smoke coming from it. On opening the door, smoke billowed out - she'd only left the other raku firing bin in the studio, thinking it had extinguished itself.
Anyway, later that day, Hay's sister emptied the contents of the bin, now believing it to be fully extinguished, on the general bonfire which, by this time, was quite large. A little while later I walked past the bonfire and noticed it was smouldering. I poked it a couple of times and it suddenly burst into flames.
The problem was that there was another pile of wood next to the general bonfire, surrounding The Wedding Tree - a plum that someone had bought us for our wedding in 2016. There was a pile of wood shavings between the bonfire and the pile of wood, which was showing signs of becoming a slow fuse.
Hoses were reeled out to try and dampen down the wood shavings, which was successful in preventing our plum tree from going up in flames, but the bonfire flames had started to light some of the dry grass leading up to Hay's sister's new studio.
Disaster was, however, averted.
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