The Bonfire

One of the things about keeping the garden in check here is the amount of prunings and loppings that is generated. As an alternative to carting it off to the recycling plant (for which we are charged by weight) we decided to go for the cheaper option of applying to the council for a license to burn the rubbish.

 

We had built up a fair sized bonfire, and the original intention was to set it alight at Easter. In this part of The Netherlands, Easter bonfires (Paasvuuren) are a traditional part of the celebrations. However, we were hit by a double whammy. First, the council informed us that the license we had to light a bonfire was not valid for a Paasvuur, so we could not light it at sunset on Easter Sunday. OK, we thought, then we’ll light it on the Saturday. "Not so fast", replied the Fire Brigade, "because of the dry weather we’ve been having, we will not allow bonfires at all at the moment"… So we’ve had the bonfire sitting waiting expectantly in the field for a suitable moment.

 

Well, today it suddenly came. The wet weather last week meant that the Fire Brigade’s ban had been lifted, and today dawned dry with relatively little wind. A quick call to the council to tell them we intended to light the fire, followed by the fetching of a bale of straw from our neighbouring farmer, and we were all set. Not ever having done this ourselves before, we asked another neighbour to be on hand and to light the fire. All went exceedingly well as can be seen from the photos. The one bad note was that once the fire was underway, it suddenly became apparent that there was a Blackbird’s nest deep inside the bonfire. One fledgling managed to escape the burning building, as it were, and crawled to safety. We left it to its own devices, but later in the afternoon it had disappeared. Because I don’t think it was able to fly, I suspect that its vanishing was probably caused by a passing crow… Such is Nature…