LIFE
What Makes Fire So Alluring?
I never feel as alive or as contemplative as when staring into and stoking flames
With both hands I seize a hunk of wood the size of a footstool, and fling it in the fire. Which roars in delight at this new offering, swallows it down into its flaming maw, leaps higher, eager for more. We prance about the pyre like fevered dervishes, zealous acolytes in thrall to our new god.
Fuelled in part by beer, for sure. But mainly something more primeval. The human love of fire itself. Our ancestral saviour and protector in the lonely darkness.
The scene plays out on a small plot of woodland owned by a friend’s father in the countryside of Kent, in southeast England. We’ve been invited to spend the weekend at what is, according to the local planning laws, supposed to be a trailer. Good luck towing that bloated behemoth down the winding track that leads here. It’s more like some vast Scandinavian log cabin — it’s even got a sauna for fuck’s sake!
But the real appeal of the setting, the memory that still burns bright within me, is the chance to indulge in some primitive slash-and-burn revelry. The forest, or rather wood, or rather copse, needs thinning. One more skilled in tree husbandry than us wannabe savages has marked a few trunks for the…
