Tinderbox Saus-age-es

Sorting paperwork at the family home today. My fourteen-year-old nephew came with us. Good excuse to prise him away from his X-Box. We gave him manly things to do, like breaking up furniture and carting it to the bonfire heap. We had reams of paperwork to burn but hadn't brought any matches.

I said that we needed a tin to make a fire in. We found an old After Eight lidded box and I filled it with ripped up paper and tiny pieces of wood. My nephew and I turned on the solid oven hotplate, put a piece of tissue on it, waited until it started to glow, then blew it until it burst into flames. I thrust the flaming tissue into our tin and we carried our fire down to the heap where it started a conflagration. I suddenly had a flashback to when I was young. An image of a box and a dog with eyes like saucers. The Tinderbox! That's what we had created. All I remember is the title and the illustration in a book I had as a child. It was one of Hans Andersen's early tales.

I had intended to make us sausage, mash and onion gravy for lunch but my sister had made soup so I still had the sausages in my car. We put them on a baking tray and that on a shovel, which we balanced over the flames, supported by a woodworm-ridden chair. They were soon sizzling and squirting fountains of fat. 

My sister's dog Ollie is not usually allowed to beg or eat human food. I got a hot sausage, blew on it then broke it into three. The first piece I gave him he spat on the ground. The second he politely consumed. The third he nearly bit my arm off. :) We loved our alfresco sausage feast. I drove home with a happy feeling. I know that my nephew will forever remember how to make a tinderbox in the same way that I remember how to lay a fire as my father showed me. 

(My title refers to that dog on Esther Rantzen's That's Life that used to say "saus-age-es" when its master worked its jaws up and down.)