I have a morning ritual now, not by choice but by mechanical failure. The underfloor heating is sulking while an engineer and a control unit play calendar roulette, so the house is kept civilised by a log burner and routine.
The routine is efficient, repeatable, and smugly superior to newspaper. Four or five firelighters in the grate, a neat little pyre of kindling, logs on top. No smoke, no drama, no coughing fit while the flue decides whether today is the day it believes in physics. It works. I am very pleased with myself.
To light the firelighters I use a plastic lighter. This is where the gods of irony enter.
Yesterday morning I placed the lighter temporarily somewhere utterly wrong. On top of the log burner. Cast iron, already warming up, quietly doing what cast iron has done since the Industrial Revolution. I then went about my business, confident that all was well because it always is, until it very suddenly was not.
An hour later I noticed the lighter. It had not exploded. It had not even burst into flame. It was simply… resigning. Slumping. Becoming one with the stove in a slow, plastic surrender. A minute or two more and it would have progressed from embarrassment to incident.
Extraction required delicacy. A metal spatula. A steady hand. No sudden movements. I peeled it off like a bad decision and drowned it in a bowl of water, where it hissed quietly and contemplated its life choices.
Disaster averted. No fire brigade. No insurance forms. No explaining to anyone why I had managed to set fire to a thing designed to create fire safely.
This is the joy of solid fuel heating. It rewards competence and punishes complacency with enthusiasm. It waits patiently for you to assume that because you have done something a hundred times, the hundred-and-first time will be the same. Then it introduces molten polymer into the conversation.
The lesson is not that log burners are dangerous. The lesson is that they are honest. They do exactly what they say on the tin. Hot things make other things hot. Plastic does not negotiate. Ritual is not immunity.
This morning I lit the fire again. The lighter lives somewhere else. And I will continue to believe, probably wrongly, that I am now immune to further stupidity.
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