I'm a firestarter...crappy firestarter


Now, I forgot to mention the other night, that which is now the last night of drinking for a while, there was a guy named Guy who came around to the hostel to perform a Freak Show. Going under the name "King Jerky", he proceeded to pierce his body with all sorts of sharp objects, including lying on borken glass. He also swallowed fire, and invited some of us to have a taste. So I was stood there, head back, eating fire a-plenty. No no no, not dangerous at all.

Anyway, I'd not had enough of this, so a few of us asked him if he could teach us to blow fire later on. So, on this fine Saturday evening, just as the sun was setting, I found myself standing by the pool at Js, flaming sticks in one hand and bottle of kerosene in the other. The idea is to blow the kerosene out of your mouth in one quick spurt, trying to blow it out in a fine a spray as possible, so that the liquid atomises and ignites against the sticks, producing a large fireball. It's also a good idea to move the sticks away quickly so that the flame does not come back to your lips, as it can suck all the oxygen out of your lungs and collapse them. This happened to a mate of King Jerky's only last week, he told us before we started. Very inspiring.

But we all gave it a go, and after a few attempts which produced nothing but sparks, I got a big-ish fireball out, much to the amazement of the assorted onlookers, who had not wanted to drink kerosene. King Jerky told us that it tasted a lot worse than the British equivalent. Presumably also better than meths but worse then lighter fliud, though I haven't tried the other two and don't intend to either. From the bottle of kerosene - incidentally plastered with "Poison" labels - I swallowed a couple of drops (unavoidable) and spent the rest of the night burping up kerosene. Very weird.

But not as weird as Boogie Nights, which I went to watch at the cinema afterwards. I wasn't very impressed, but then I'm not a woman or gay, so the 13" special effect didn't do much for me at the end.

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