Some time ago I retold the incendiary tale of me lighting a rocket in the kitchen and the ensuing mayhem when things went pear shaped.
Yesterday witnessed another insane but milder incendiary incident which was avoidable of pre-existing knowledge had been recalled and deployed.
After the evening meal, I was sitting at the computer desk typing away and miding my own business when two of my offspring improvised a game of table tennis using their hands and a ping pong ball. After several glancing blows to my body I suffered a direct hit to my eye and decided to end the game forever.
I seized the ping pong ball with one hand and retrieved a chef,s blow torch from the back of the desk, lit the torch and then used the flame to ignite the ping pong ball - mistake number one. The celluloid is very flammable.
I succeeded in blowing out the flames but my smugness was premature. The ping pong ball spontaneously re-ignited - mistake number two - I'd forgotten that very flammable should have read extremely flamable.
Good bye smug grin, hello wide eyed panic preceding a panic driven juggling of a fiery chunk of plastic until the heat resistance of my epidermis was compromised and I dropped the burning remains on the not so cheap woollen carpet and stood on them to put them out. Lifting my foot the extinguished remains re-ignited. Mistake number three - extremely flammable should be replaced with extremely f'kin flammable.
Having failed to be educated by mistakes one to three I stood on the burning remains again and again for mistkes four and five until the fourth stamp successfully extinguished the flames.
My kids were in agony from laughing, my wife was in pain from screaming at me and I am currently living in Coventry being unable to apologise without laughing.
The damage to the carpet has proved to be minimal with a mild scorching only just visible.
Thing is, I knew how rapidly celluloid from ping pong balld burned - I'd just forgotten/failed to make the right connections before I embarked on the trip to internal exile.
For those who want to explore the flammability of ping pong balls a tad more safely and impress the offspring with the effects:
1, cut a ping pong ball into small pieces.
2. Wrap the pieces in aluminium foil.
3. Roast the foil with a match or a lighter.
4. When smoke emerges from the foil drop it onto a saucer and watch the device fill a small room with smoke and the smell of wintergreen - your very first smoke bomb.
Shame I'd forgotten about the smoke bomb. Its recollection might have saved the day yesterday
Maybe not
