OK – well, not actually letting it get that far…….

It’s the second time I’ve had a fire incident since we’ve been here and this one was probably the closest ‘clumsy Annie’ has come to actually going and doing it – burning down the house through carelessness. In my defence, I thought I was being the perfect housewife/home-maker so I think I have some mitigating circumstances.

How did I do this?

Well, last night, I was setting the table for dinner (yep, that beautiful oak table I’ve waxed lyrical about this week – yep, you’ve guessed it, it was nearly toast). I laid out the cutlery and lit the candles then went into the kitchen to finish the cooking. A couple of minutes later, I popped into the dining room to make sure that I’d not forgotten anything and it’s a good job I did – we had a fire on the table.

This little box of chequered candles was in the stash of goodies sent down to us by Claz (the stash that included the hot rod duck that I photographed a couple of months ago). I lit four of the centre squares on Christmas day and the four that I lit melted, along with several of the others surrounding them……so I assumed that my earlier belief that the container they were in was designed to have them lit inside it, not to be taken out.

Last night, I lit the outside squares, the theory being that then we’d have a big melty thing with wicks in it. Only what happened was that the wet wax soaked into the container and then caught fire.

The flames were only 5-6 inches tall when I spotted it, grabbed the plate and took it to the kitchen where the whole lot went into the sink and got ‘rained on’. I was juggling the flaming plate thinking to myself that one false move and we’d all be toast…..wondering if I’d done the right thing by picking it up and generally panicking.

Luckily for me, no further mishap fell, other than our sink getting clogged up with cold wax but that was easily sorted by a kettle full of boiling water down it this morning.

Anyway, in the spirit of ‘waste not want not’ I decided the charred, wet remains would make a good photo for today. I’m rather pleased with the results and I’m also now sort of kinda glad I set the house alight again…….er, not really Mr Insurance man!

Last year, we were watching the fury of the Thames.