I can’t help it. I just love the flames. I fell in love with them when I was six and set my bed on fire. I hadn’t meant to, and I was in it at the time, but all in all the whole incident was a bit of serendipity really. Somehow flames seem to make even the dullest of situations better and believe me this party is about as dull as it comes. I torched my first petrol station, Texaco it was, at the age of eleven when I was at Eton and it just got better and better after that. Oh I played with explosives, the usual boy stuff, initially the contents of fireworks. Then I used, iodine crystals and Eight-eighty ammonia to produce nitrogen triiodide, safe when wet but very dodgy when dry. I’d poured it on bread, left it on sunny window sills to dry and watched the flies explode as they set it off by landing on it. It was ok, but some how lacking.

I made TNT, but only the once. I’ve always been good at that sort of thing, I got a first eventually from Oxford in chemistry. Making TNT isn’t difficult, but messing about with ice freezing mixtures, fuming nitric and concentrated sulphuric is a bore. I produced enough stabilised TNT to make it worth while, but you need a pretty unstable detonator to make it go pop, and they say you could tell how long one of the early workers with fulminate detonators had been in the job by how many of his fingers were missing. Using a heavy metal azide, like lead azide, for a detonator, just forget it! As for making trinitroglycerine, sure it’s doable on a small scale, but again dodgy, and probably not worth the effort. My single agricultural fertiliser bomb was fun, the gravel went hundreds of feet into the air, but it was an awful lot of effort for not much of a spectacle. So sometime before I hit the age of twenty I decided I’d stick with the flames and leave the explosives to the macho types with underdeveloped senses of self preservation.

I got dragged to this damned alfresco affair by my girlfriend Penelope. Nag, nag, bloody nag, sometimes I think she’d look better wreathed in flames. God I’m bored! I wonder what can I do to liven things up a bit? There’s not much time left before Penelope finishes gossiping and comes to drag me off to dance on the lawn and of course be bitten by bugs. So there is even less to gather resources, fortunately I always carry a few innocuous looking helpers on me, accelerants to those in the know; innocuous that is if I get picked up, cigarette lighter, matches, you know the sort of thing. I don’t smoke, but Penelope likes a cigarette with a drink, so I always have a packet on me because she never has any. When I met her she told me wasn’t room in her handbag and she could always cadge one, so like the gentleman I am I suggested I carried them for her. I wonder if the propellant in that deodoriser spray that I saw in the lavatory is propane. I’ll take a leak and find out.

The cars seem the best bet for a bit of entertainment. There’s a row of Rollers, Bentleys and a fair sprinkling of top of the range Mercs and a couple of XF Jags closely parked. Get the fuel tank of the one in the middle going and the rest will be unstoppable; all I need are now some chestnuts and few potatoes for roasting. You know what? This might turn out to be a decent barbecue party after all.