Twisted Fire Starter

Romain is back!  After 6 weeks away, he got back this morning at 6 am - after being kidnapped by his buddies in Paris fresh off the plane from Kosovo, for one last night of drunken debauchery before the sh*t gets real and our Fraussie gets here.

And one of his top priorities upon arriving home - after paying due attention to me and our growing fraussie bump of course - was to get the fireplace cranking.

Mum - who is here visiting from Australia and helping to put a bit more Aussie in our Fraussie household - and I had left this particular job for Romain's return, figuring we were both pretty clueless when it came to chimneys and ran a real risk of burning the place to the ground if we tried to get it going ourselves.

This is Romain, resplendent in his gaudy, dad-worthy, christmas woollen jumper, lighting the inaugural match - full of hope and anticipation for many a night spent cosied up in front of the fire place with a whiskey and good book.

The only thing missing from this photo to make it worthy of a 70s christmas card is a seedier moustache on Romain and maybe me  in the periphery with a tray of martinis

This is him about 2 minutes later, declaring the whole thing a disaster, as smoke poured from the chimney into the room, choking us all in the process and sending us running to fling open all the windows in the house.

Romain, defeated.

"It will never work" he said shaking his head - ever the optimist.  "Some chimneys just don't work".  "Rubbish!"  I said, knowing absolutely nothing about chimneys or fireplaces.  My theory was that the chimney just needed to 'remember' how to be a chimney and we needed to give it a while to work again.

So after about 15 minutes, phone-call consultations with various fire-savvy family members and the removal of a log that we decided was too green and was the main culprit behind the smoke issue, the fire DID start behaving itself.

And it here it is.  Looking like a fair-dinkum, magnifique fraussie fire.

And here is our lovely fire-making gear, which used to belong to my Grandpa.  I don't think it was ever used to stoke too many fires in Rockhampton, given 'winter' there usually remains a balmy 20 degrees, so we'll be sure to put it to good use over here.

So I'm writing this post now in front of our crackling fire, feeling quite Christmassy all of a sudden.  I might go and grab some rum balls from the fridge.