There is something brewing in the cool night air. An intoxicating electricity. An incendiary vibration. A spark waiting to happen. I am musing over this seemingly higher state of consciousness, as I crack open the ring pull on the beer can, have a gulp, then turn to light the fire.
In a matter of mere minutes, the cardboard pizza boxes, rough kindling, and kiln dried logs are flickering in towering orange flames, licking large against the darkness visible – as family members huddle round the rusting hulk of a fire pit, spirits of long dead ancestors assemble in their droves, and the neighbourhood acclimatises to the anthemic house tunes belting out in my cold back yard.
I am dreaming of twisted fire starting.
Dreaming of a lifelong fascination with nature’s powerful third element of the South.
A fascination stretching back to childhood days, birthed in a fiery flicker in the black pupils of innocent new-born eyes. Something deep ignited. Burned into the hemmed fabric of the subconscious. Coal fired into the dreams of the Sandman. Tattoo branded into the twisted strands of DNA.
And I am dreaming of all things fire, arson, smoke, and purging – and how they burned deep from an early age.
I discovered the hard mined source of fire in the tiny, dusty black coal shed, of my ancestral grandparent’s Merthyr Tydfil home nestled in the wild Welsh Valleys. I would watch the magical alchemical transformation from shed, to fireplace, to flickering flame, as a wee bairn raised in the long dark shadows of the towns iron, steel, and coal mining industrial past.
Years later, I would find myself on a breakaway Holy Island in the North of the Island – a rebellious youngster trying to breathe life into the lungs of a failing fire. I was there with my younger brother and school mates on a family summer holiday, trying to cook runny eggs for an improvised supper in fading sunlight and adverse elemental conditions.
But the yolk was on me.
As the last kiln dried log burns down to flickering red embers, my mind turns to where the next combustible fuel might come from, as one-by-one the family members leave the fireside by the backdoor.
Cracking open another beer for the craic and the spirits gathered round the dying embers – I am celebrating the party like Prince is present and it’s the millennium eve of 1999, with complete disregard for the world tilting precariously on its axis.
Entranced by the charred burning stump, I am reminded of the thirteen years I believed my sorry arsed soul was destined for the eternal fires of Hell, a belief compounded by nightly iron-tight revolving doors of Satanic nightmares only drowned out by downers.
So, it remains to stoke away the fires of these hellish memories, till the last spark dies in the crisp night air. I feed the embers with ripped-up lottery junk mail, empty beer boxes, and broken garden canes – to prolong the blaze of this twisted fire party, to squeeze life from the raw third element, to extinguish the burning fire in my soul.
And, hours later, out of the darkness, a furious elemental gust of air blows out the fire, spreading the embers of the rusted firepit across the backyard, leaving me covered in the ashes to ashes of the dying night.
For more, please subscribe to ‘The Script on Repeat’ here