Stoked | #JusJoJan24 the 23rd

Stoked is the prompt for Tuesday. I had even more difficulty with this one.

Just Jot It January is by Linda Hill (with help from her friends). You can jot something down for the prompt anywhere, any time, just post it on your blog before the end of the month (so it seems). You can read the full instructions here.

Stoked – Jan 23rd

This is linked back to Nicole’s blog and to Linda’s post for the day.

There are lots of informal uses of the word stoked, but I’ve never really understood half of them in context. I still think of it as something you do to a fire, or a boiler’s engine.

I remember seeing an edition of Who Do You Think You Are, where the celebrity had explored her posh side, and was now trying to track the true story of her father. An Irishmen, he’d been caught up in the 1900s revolution, which led to him being virtual unable to find work. Eventually he got a job on a cargo ship, as a stoker. It sounded fine. What he found once he was on board was little better than slave labour under appalling conditions. He jumped ship when he got back to Cardiff (the ship’s base), and eventually drowned in a canal.

It stayed with me because the celeb had an old picture of him from those ship days, which was why she wanted to find out about him, because he looked ‘sad.’ I thought he looked traumatised. And when you heard what happened, you were fairly sure it was no accident he went into the canal. Poor man.

Stoking a fire is hot work. I have a log burner, which I fired up once or twice last week when temps outside were -11 (C) and the front room needed a boost. I have to be extremely careful when adding logs. So I wait till they really are just glowing before adding the next one. The creams I have now are full of ‘danger of fire’ warnings, and I do not want to have my skin, or any clothing that has been in contact with them (bedclothes especially) anywhere in range of a stray spark. I do not wish to be stoked in any sense of the word!