| Note: What makes this story ironic is that just yesterday I realised that I had never tried solvent
abuse, and wondered what state my brain would have been in if I had spent my formative years
sniffing Bostic behind the bike sheds.
Last night we said goodbye to St.Patrick's weekend with a few quiet beers, followed by a few
very loud cocktails in a trendy Dublin drinking establishment. At about 12.30, we groggily
staggered out, got some hideous taco fries in Aberakebabera and threw the last of our money into
the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire machine.
Colin - my flatmate - and I then went home. I realised that I was still really, really hungry so I put on
some of God's own post-pub food - hotdogs. I boiled up some water, excavated a pot from the bottom
of the pile of washing-up, stuck in some hot dogs, poured the water over them, turned the
hob on and then went to kick Colin's ass at Fifa 2000.
After several ass kickings by Colin (I can't rememebr if it was the Aston Villa 9-Newcastle
3 game or the Barcelona 11 - Real Madrid 2 game) I realised that I had completely forgotten
about the hotdogs. They had been on for a good twenty minutes at this stage, and the suggested
cooking time was around 3 minutes.
I also realised that there was a really nice smell of eucalyptus in the air.
There's a small alcove in our living room which holds an oven and a crap fridge. The landlord
claims that it's a kitchen. I staggered over to it. Only now I couldn't see it, because a huge
cloud of smoke was billowing out. I fought my way in, coughing and flapping desperately at the smoke.
On the hobs, the hotdogs were looking distinctly unboiled. The hob next to it, however, appeared
to have this odd green square around it. It took me a while to figure out what was going on.
In my drunken state I had turned on the wrong hob. The hob I had turned on had had a tupperware lid
on it. Had. The heat hadn't just melted the top - the entire thing had actually
evaporated where it made contact with the hob. And now our house was filled with extremely
toxic smoke, which was filling our lungs, sending deadly particles rushing into our blood stream...
...and making me feel really, really giggly.
"Um, Colin? I think I might have set fire to the house."
Colin raced over to see what was wrong. Colin gets scared everytime I set foot in the kitchen,
ever since I created an artificial lake by turning the tap on and forgetting about it for forty
minutes. A look of panic crossed his face. "Christ I didn't even smell that."
"That's weird," I said, smiling slightly, "it's such a nice minty smell."
He took a deep sniff. "Actually yeah. It's quite pleasant. We should burn plastic more often. It'll
save on pot pourri."
We both laughed. "You know," I said, "we should get this smoke out of here before we die. Or it SETS
OFF THE SMOKE ALARM!!!"
The previous weekend I had almost gotten thrown out of a hotel in Kerry for consistently setting off
the smoke alarm. I ran into the hallway and started blowing and waving, trying desperately to stop it
going off. Colin stumbled into the hallway, saw me jumping manically and collapsed laughing. I think I did too.
We stood back up and went into the kitchen and tried to get the melted plastic off the hob. I decided to pour
a little water on it, to cool it down and minimise the possibility of us burning our hands. "What are you doing
that for," asked Colin.
I thought about the question for a while. "It looks cool."
So we carried on, cleaning the hobs, inhaling more smoke until we could barely stand. We stopped to consider our options.
"Dude, the house is full of smoke. What do we do?"
I thought. "Open a window and play more FIFA?"
"Sounds good to me."
He picked Israel and I picked Chile. He still beat me 7-5. | 
