The Last Big Bonfire

Arrived early in the gloaming, about 7pm. The wood was arranged any-old-how, just as it has been piled up, that it, not properly as a bonfire. And it's been piled there under the snow and rain since January, some of it, and was sodden. Rotten wood anyway really soaks up moisture, and when I've been dealing with it a lot the last 10 months I've become more and more convinced that the American pejorative verb to suck is not sexual as some suppose but is actually a dead metaphor likening the person or thing that sucks to rotten wood, which literally sucks moisture. But telling someone 'The movie could be compared to an abandoned shed which has not been painted in years and whose timbers have dried out and begun to absorb moisture from the ground and from the rain' would be rather tortuous compared to 'the movie sucked'.

So what I'm saying is, the fire took a bit of lighting. I wasted a whole box of firelighters and a litre of white spirit, and it was still touch and go. I began fanning the meagre flames from the last of the firelighter, and it pulled back from the brink. Giving off a lot of steam as it dried out, it was soon blazing like merry hell. There's something very pleasant about being at the allotment as it gets dark, not a soul around, just the light from the fire and the big lamps on the junction of the M8/M80, (which you can just see through the branches of the ash tree in the photo).

This was the rotten stuff from the shed, and from the SE boundary/midden area. It's the last of 3 or 4 big bonfires I've had. As it was sitting right outside the shed door, where I sit-out showers of rain, I am sick and tired of looking at it, so glad to see it gone. And it almost marks the end of the rubbish removal era at Plot 79. All that' left now is a pile of broken buckets and odd bits of metal, and whatever rubble can't be recycled in paths, heaped up on top of the Eastern end of the Old Greenhouse Foundation. So this will be the last area to clear, by barrow. In a neat touch, it was the first part of the plot which I cultivated when I moved in last June, clearing the weeds and planting it with phacelia and borage, just for the sake of planting something, which benefitted the bees if not us.