A match made in hell...
I live, as do so many people in Bristol, in a rather nice old house that’s been converted into flats. It’s a decent size one bed property that my landlord, who lived here for a fair few years before renting it out, has spent a sizable chunk of money on making look nice. This includes having stripped the floor boards in the open plan living room / kitchen. This has revealed the quirky, uneven original flooring which has been stained a nice walnut colour, to set off the feature wall, which is papered in a kind of bronze and teal abstract paper.

But this isn’t a property website, and you care not for the tasteful decor and the high gloss kitchen units. The important bit is I live on the first floor, there is a flat below me and I have wooden floors.

So, one evening, I’d cooked my staple dinner of a piece of fish and some vegetables. As the living space is all open plan, the dinner smell can sometimes linger and the extractor fan isn’t always strong enough to shift it (at least if I still want to be able to hear the TV). So I have some nice scented candles which I keep around for just such an occasion.

One of the candles, a vanilla one in a large glass jar, was burned about half way down. This meant that I couldn’t get at the wick with a lighter, I needed to use a match. I struck said match and, without warning and seemingly in slow motion, the top half of the match broke away and fell, still lit, in between a crack in the floor boards and down into the crawl space separating my floor and downstairs’ ceiling. It was almost beautiful, for a second I was transfixed as the match tumbled downwards. Then a small ball of flame leapt up from between the floor boards and I screamed like a crazy woman. I grabbed a pan from the work top, filled it with water and hurled it across the floor, hoping desperately that I’d doused the flames. I then ran downstairs to alert my neighbours. Thankfully I found them neither burned to a crisp, nor drenched in water from the ceiling. They laughed at me, a lot, and gave me some wine. I went back to my flat, mollified, but still had to sleep in the living room next to a bucket of cold water on the off chance that there was a slow burning fire under the floor.


I have never lit a match in my house since and have become paranoid about setting the place on fire to the degree that I won’t run the washing machine unless I’m in the house to check it’s not setting the place ablaze.

Even reliving it to write this down has made me a bit shivery... *shudders*
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Mon 23 Aug 2010, 14:09, 1 reply)

Yeah - we're in a pretty similar situation with our living room, and I'm a smoker.
This sort of thing terrifies me, especially considering that the woman below us is in her late 80s.

Still, smoking's great.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 23 Aug 2010, 14:13, closed)