From the allotment I moved on, consuming street after street until the floor was inch deep in water.  My feet were numb with cold.  As the flame scorched its way through housing estates and shopping centres, the still pools of water became frozen mirrors. Croydon was returning to its ice age.

            When my parents came to fetch me at the end of the summer they found me cured of my dangerous attraction to fire.  The family congratulated itself on the efficacy of its solution.  Uncle Otto remained curiously reticent on the subject of Croydon’s immolation.  But years later he confessed it had been a liberation.  The beauty of the frozen mirrors of ice had inspired him to recreate the town as a place of fantasy.  Foaming rivers and crystal waterfalls took the place of the new multi-storey car park.  Exotic birds and animals could be spotted in the jungle that had grown up around the leisure centre.    There were no allotments. 

I puzzled over it. Uncle Otto had turned Croydon into a paradise for the gods.  And who’s to say it is not?  But was this insight granted to him by fire or by ice?  And then I understood the subtle truth, that fire and ice are not distinct, but interdependent.  Fire dances most fervently on tongues of ice, and ice itself achieves its consummation only in the moment that it surrenders to the flames.

            A few years ago, hampered by failing eyesight, weak hamstrings and the increasing number of roadworks in Croydon, Uncle Otto swerved on his bicycle and was squashed under the wheels of a local bus.  It was many months before the representatives from the permafrost institute in Novosibirsk came to examine the body.  They rejected it as being too much damaged to be of any scientific use.  Poor Uncle Otto.  After heated debate, the family came to a decision.  Uncle Otto was cremated.