Fire
I love bonfires. When I was a child I loved fireworks too. Now I can take them or leave them but a good fire is a wonderful thing. We had a fire in the field the other night. We had been piling wood up for a couple of weeks, prunings of shrubs, trimmings of the native hedges, brambles and bits of holly cut back from behind the shepherd's hut. The woodpile was ready to light and the pallet was covered with perennial weed to burn when things got really hot. It was a pitchblack night, cold and wet with gusts of rain blowing out of the darkness, snatching at the fire and hurling flame and smoke back into the blackness. Standing on the doorstep it was the kind of night to drive you back inside but we gathered our coats around us and set out across the black field. Soon the centre of the fire was a mesmerising glow. Gusts of wind made it roar into sheets of flame. Our faces were hot although the rain blew cold on our...