IF I wasn’t a writer and fresh and fragrant fertiliser factotum, I think I could have made a canny career out of anything involving fire.

It’s all down to my late father, who after being demobbed from the Royal Navy following his success in bringing the Axis forces to their knees as a member of the crew of the submarine HMS Trump, joined the Cheshire Fire Brigade.

In a short but spectacular career, he managed to lose a trailer containing a valuable pump and hoses in the murky waters of the Macclesfield Canal from the back of his fire engine, as well as inducing near apoplexy in senior officers as a producer of noxious gases to put breathing apparatus sets to the sternest of tests.

One of my earliest memories is of him pulling up outside the new house we had just moved into in his fire engine – I was just turned two at the time. He cut quite a dash in his black uniform glistening with bright silver buttons, and in later years, his eyes would mist over when he was recalling the days: “When I was a fire bobby …”

Fire was his answer to everyday problems such as an overgrown garden. He would wait for a dry day and simply torch the entire plot, a scorched earth policy which didn’t endear him to neighbours, especially when he set the fence on fire, but there were no weeds for months.

And when the chimney got a bit choked up with soot, he never dreamed of sending for the sweep; he simply rolled up a few pages of the Daily Mirror, stuffed them up the chimney, and set fire to them.

Flames several feet high would roar from the top of the chimney pot for many lively minutes, and the back boiler would glow white hot, before the soot was all consumed and we had the most pristine chimney on the estate.

However, I never had the slightest desire to follow my father up ladders and into uniform – my interest lies in starting fires, not putting them out.

Hextol Towers boasts a fancy electric shredder for the disposal of confidential paperwork, but I much prefer to take all the paperwork into the garden and burn it sheet by sheet in a galvanised bucket, a process which occasionally leaves me gasping for air, but remains hugely fulfilling.

I always have the feeling that no matter how many pieces you slice a medical report into via the shredder, some jigsaw fanatic may one day piece it back together and find out the truth about the boil on my bum.

There is nothing better than getting a conflagration going with the use of a powerful magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s rays.

I have to concede that switching from an open fire to oil central heating many years ago makes life much cleaner and easier than having to light a coal fire every day, with all that ash pan emptying, stick chopping and coal carrying – but I do miss it!

There was always something quite primeval about coaxing life out of damp sticks and even damper coal on a winter’s morning, with the aid, of course, of the old broadsheet Hexham Courant, perfect both as screwed up firelighters and then makeshift bleezer second to none.

There was a real art in getting the fire to take hold, and then whisking the paper away in the split second before it went from merely turning brown to actually bursting into flames.

How was it though, having written many articles in the paper, and proofread it industriously, I always spotted a fascinating item of news which had escaped me just seconds before it was consumed by the flames, when the fire got too lively and escaped the confines of the hearth?

I much prefer an open fire to the modern, closed-in log burners, which are, of course, much more efficient as heat providers, but a poor second when it comes to doing toast on a fork, burning sweetie papers and boiling water when the electricity goes off.

I did, of course, frequently incur the wrath of Mrs Hextol by dropping coal on the rug on the way in, or ashes on the way out, and a spark did once leap out of the hearth and set fire to our incredibly elderly cat, but I always felt that was a price worth paying for the cheery glow and homely crackle of logs mixed with Shilbottle cobbles.