the Walnut Diary

Tom and Kate arrived for a fall expedition to their cottage.   After dinner somehow we discovered the fireplace channel and settled back to enjoy a few minutes of the flames and crackles of the sound track.  Four hours later we were still watching.

The neat thing about this show is that someone actually fixes the fire.  So we sat in our living room cave and like the subjects in Plato’s parable of old, sought to explain and predict the actions of the shadows behind us on the screen.

Kate’s comments quickly adopted the language and attitude of a figure skating judge:  “In Move #1 he begins with the standard half-roll with the poker.  You see how a loose grip with his right hand produces a clumsy stab, and he has to make a number of attempts to complete the roll.  Then he follows with a half-block dropped clumsily on the fire.  This is quite a slow beginning for the performance, though we can only hope he’ll get past the nerves and settle down in the more technical parts of the routine.”

Tom butted in with colour commentary:  “He’s an unpaid intern at the television station.  He was given this responsibility as a way to justify a passing grade after he had sat in the corner for a whole semester because nobody could think of anything for him to do.  He’s not happy about this task.  He obviously grew up well away from wood fires, and has no wood-burning skills whatever.”

I interrupted, “Nevertheless, the fire works really well.”

Kate just shook her head, “Our primitive nature makes it very easy to sit here and enjoy the fire.  The guy can’t lose.”

Kate lapsed into her Brian Williams voice again:  “That was Move #3, a slow, over-handed push left, with sparks.”

“So has he lost the nerves, or has he become more committed to his fire?” Tom asked.

I jumped in:  Commitment comes with the process.  Ask any new parent. Why shouldn’t the guy grow into this job?”

Bet asked, “How is this financed?  There aren’t any commercials.”

Kate used to work at the local television station.  “It’s a community service from the satellite channel.  It doesn’t cost them much.  They just turn the camera on, and they tell the college kid to put on the flannel shirt and do this, rather than going for coffee six times a night.

Tom had been watching the fire throughout this:  “That chimney’s gotta be full of creosote the way the wood is burning.”

Kate, again:  “The other thing they could have done is say: ‘Go out and make a film.  We need a filler for twenty minutes which will run on a loop.  It was his idea to do this because he was lazy.  So he set wood on fire turned on the camera, and this is what they got.

“But I’m watching it.“

I tried the Brian Williams voice:  “This was a two-handed poke.  He’s definitely getting better at it.  He just adjusted it.”  Silence.  I decide to leave the T.V. commentary to Kate.

“It should start from a cold fire, it’s so hard to come into a movie like this,” complained Tom.

Kate/Brian Williams again:  “O.K.  This is the fifth move of his routine.  With the poker he flips the block and it flares suddenly to cheers from the audience.”

Bet commented:  “There’s a lot of flame, but it’s not a pretty fire.”

Tom:  “I like something more controlled, decorative looking.  Look at it.  It’s kinda like – sloppy.”

“So the intern gets low marks for structure, high marks for flame.” I tried to summarize:  “And now we’re back to the beginning of the loop.  So his routine consists of five or six adjustments to the fire, and he becomes gradually more proficient as he goes through it, but he gets sloppy at the end.”

“I didn’t like the way he left it,” Tom grumbled.

As host I tried to surf away from the looping fireplace film, only to be chased back in seconds by the yammering of network T.V. on a Thursday night.  You don’t realize how soothing and pleasant the fireplace channel is until you switch to something else.

Back to our HD blaze just as the star performs the unsuccessful flip-and-roll.  “I heard someone laughing at the intern,” quipped Bet.  “I’ll bet you’re glad you drove seven hours to watch this.”

From the depths of the sofa Kate groaned, “I’ve got to stop watching this.  I’ve seen it.  I know the plot!”

“Wanta try the other one?” I asked.

“There’s another fireplace channel?  Sure!”