http://www.flickr.com/photos/28561874@N07/4280794145/

I'm enjoying the exponentially-decaying-moving-average here.. but I've no clue if I'm doing the right thing.

As I remember it, I'd gotten the fire going promisingly that morning, and was just shovelling out the hot ash from underneath it, which was a fine wood ash with some bits of coal ash in it, as the fire starts on wood and goes to coal. I normally wear some gloves for this kind of thing since it's uncomfortable that close to the fire, but the gloves I use for this had fallen apart so were thrown away a few days beforehand.

So when a burning ball of newspaper flopped out onto the hand that was just removing a shovel full of hot ash from the fire, I jumped, and the ash puffed all over me. I remember feeling something soft flopping into my hair, dropping the shovel, and feeling that brief flash of pain in my face that tells me I've been burnt, then smelling burning hair and seeing bits of burning newspaper fragments floating around and landing on me. So I ran off and washed my face under the cold tap, seeing lots of bits of burnt hair falling off; worrying I might have hot ash still in my hair and not wanting to shove my hand up there to find out, I went to the bathroom, threw off my clothes, and leapt into the shower, whereupon lots of singed hair and grit came out.

However, we since found lots of soot on the ground outside, downstream from the chimney, which suggests something more interesting happened. As the snow was thawing after a couple of weeks of being frozen, perhaps there was some accumulation of ice/snow in the chimney, which fell down and thereby pushed a load of hot air back out through the fire, initially blasting the burning newspaper out at me then (while I was reacting to the burning paper and had instinctively closed my eyes (thankfully!)), blasting me with hot ash direct from the fire itself, soot from the chimney, and general hot fumes.

After I'd hosed myself down in the shower and was convinced that the reek of burning hair was just lingering in the air, and wasn't still on fire, I told Sarah what had happened, and she covered my face and hand (which showed signs of first-degree burns) with cold wet tea-towels and kept replacing them. I started to get too cold from this, despite a covering of blankets, so we stopped that after a while; I was feeling a bit drained, and mindful of the dangers of shock after a burn (and that the area burnt was nearly the area of my palm, which is the rule-of-thumb as to when to take burns victims to A&E in case the shock really harms them; the area of a palm is around 1% of the surface area of your body, which leaves a nice safety margin, as a 10% burn is where shock really starts to become a danger), I went and lay down under a warm duvet to rest a bit. I felt a bit woozy and weak for a while, but then it passed so I got up again and started moving about; just in time to rescue Sarah, who had fallen over in the snow outside, as I'd not been available to take Jean outside

I think the cold wet t-towels prevented any major blistering happening; the only bits of me that have blistered are a tiny bit on my hand and a bit on my lip that I had trouble keeping the cold material onto as it kept sliding off when I talked or moved. I just looked a bit red for the first day or so, but today, my body seems to have decided to discard a layer of damaged skin, so I'm starting to get the manky-looking green and yellow patches shown above

More of me looks burnt now than it did at the time - at the time all that showed was a few patches on my forehead, to the right of my eyes, near my lips, and on my right hand. If the amount of me that's red now had looked or felt burnt at the time, I'd have asked for an ambulance, as I'm sure it's now over the area of my palm! Still, I came through with only the mildest symptoms of shock, so now it's just a matter of looking after my skin so I don't get any scarring, and managing the occasional pain when the sensitive skin is touched roughly. I'm still a bit easily tired, and getting thirsty a lot; so I'm being careful not to overdo things, and making sure I eat and drink well.