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Sucks to feel patronised man

My goal isn’t to patronize but to engage with the content of specific posts.

Oh well that's alright then

About sides: most arguments have more than one side, but some have no ends. I read it on the back of a matchbox when I was a lad, and my experience bears it out. Amazing what you can learn from the back of a matchbox. But I think they replaced the wise sayings with ads eventually.

All I've ever gotten from a matchbox was a toy car, so colour me jealous.

I used to love playing with matches when I was a kid

I had a friend who was the same so we obviously got split up for the sake of the neighbourhood

I remember a fire that went a bit out of control and he was jumping all over it with his brand new puma trainers on lol

I can picture it now. I was laughing so much

Good memories eh

I'm lucky I've never had a fire get out of control. There's certainly been opportunities for it to happen.

It was pretty big and we were only about 10 years old

My ex sort of got my need and he used to take me to places where I could do it safely

I could easily sit up all night playing with it and keeping it under control and watching the flames dancing

I find it really relaxing

When I was in grade 9 two classmates set the athletics field on fire, multiple firetrucks and police responded.

I, wot is well pyromaniacal, approve where this thread is going.

There were pictures of Captain Webb and a big battleship called England's Glory on the front, to inspire patriotic hubris. And safety matches were optional so we didn't feel like we were being nannied because we could easily choose dangerous matches instead, which were a lot more fun, and you could strike them on any suitable surface. The side of the box was made of sandpaper for striking the matches in the orthodox way. You could also use it as a handy miniature sanding block.

Mind you those Matchbox Series cars were snazzy, so you needn't feel too left out.

That brings to my mind the time when my sister nearly broke up the family with a fire. She was usually the model of the Victorian good girl, and I was the little sod, but for some reason she started a bonfire on the rubbish dump in the back garden. It was quite well-controlled and we put it out before Mum got home, but it never did take much to set her off, and the damn thing was still smoking like mad. Next thing we knew her and Dad were having a blazing row and after a few histrionics Dad walked out, vowing never to return. He came back after a day or two but it did rather upset our emotional applecarts. That and another similar incident soured my relationship with him for the rest of his life and left me with abandonment issues. Sis wasn't so badly affected because being a bit older than me she probably knew Mum and Dad's behavioural patterns better than I did, and figured he'd be back when he'd calmed down, but I believed him.

Anyway, apart from that my memories of playing with fire are good. We used to piss a big Scotsman off by filling the chimney of his air raid shelter with dry grass and setting fire to it. He yelled Gaelic abuse at us from his upstairs window as we ran away laughing our naughty little heads off.

Fireworks were great. Bangers were the best, we used to chuck them at all kinds of innocent and guilty targets. We had a paraffin heater in the house so I used to nick the fuel and play with that and a box of matches. I'd seen Wagon Train on the telly, and the Injuns were always shooting fire-tipped arrows at the wagons. It was no problem for me to make a bow and arrows, so one thing led to another. When I got obsessed with music a bit later on, society was a lot safer. But they didn't appreciate it till I'd got good at it. My voice was worse than Yoko One at first, and louder, and I kept going round and round practising the same little bit.

Yeah it was fun in the olden days wasn't it

We used to go garden hopping and we used to nick the little paraffin lamps out of the green houses

Crikey, we're both paraffin thieves. But I was more ethical because I never took the device, only the fuel, and I left enough so there was hope that my parents didn't notice.

I had a special way of cutting a piece out of a cake so that the angle of the part that had already been taken didn't increase. If you're going to nick something off people who could easily identify you as the thief, it's helpful if you can rig it so that they never realise they've been robbed. It wasn't so much a case of Mum's loss of the value of the cake, because the ingredients were dirt cheap and she enjoyed baking, it was just that she wanted to limit my consumption of it, and I disagreed with her idea of a fair portion.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

And what did you use the paraffin for?

I have a few old red council roadwork paraffin lamps.
I have them filled with citronella oil for party nights on the assumption that might reduce mosquitos.

The thing most likely to get pinched in my neighbourhoods was a few feet of garden hose for bong making.
It was hilarious how short some people's hoses ended up.