I liked setting fire to stuff when I was a kid. A popular pasttime was to buy a few boxes of matches, light one match, wedge it into the end of the box, and hold it in your hand until just the right moment before the whole box went up. 7p well spent.
In my first year at university, I lived on campus in halls of residence with a shared kitchen and bathrooms. I was on a floor with a great set of lads, 2 of which are among my best friends to this day.
Anyway, the university had had a porters lodge, and it was part of their remit to patrol the various accommodation blocks. There were three of them who worked shifts. Len, who was quiet as a mouse, Big Dave, who was a terrific bloke and was known to stop off for a chat and a joint while doing his rounds, and Ivor, who was a silver haired, bespectacled Hitler with a rotund face and a serious demeanor.
Ivor has this wonderful knack of coming into our floor just as we were doing stuff we shouldn't be doing, like having a can fight (my mate has a scar above his right eye to this day) or shouting abuse at passers by. In fact, one of the lads nearly got thrown out of university for shouting "show us your beavers" at a bunch of prospective female students who were passing by outside our kitchen window, because they were mostly foreign students and it was misheard as "show us your visas", which would have been racist. He had to explain to a disciplinary panel that he wasn't being racist, but sexist instead, and got off with a warning.
Anyway out of sheer stupidity one night in the kitchen, there were about six of us sat round drinking Spar lager and playing a drinking game called "Arsehole". I decided to set fire to a piece of paper on the kitchen table.
At the exact moment I had my lighter to the end of a piece of paper, Ivor walked in to the kitchen.
He said, "what are you doing, son?"
The best reply I could think of was, "intellectual escapism".
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