imaginable and failed repeatedly to get it going, even with loads of paper and cigarette lighters. I decided not to get involved, but this was easier said than done, as on a couple of occasions I’ve taught classes on survival skills, which have included how to light a fire by friction and, believe it or not, how to get a fire going from a can of Coke and a bar of chocolate.
“Say what?” I hear you cry from your comfy armchair. For those of you now scratching your head, I’ll elaborate. You take a cold can of Coke and carefully pour its contents into a glass containing ice and a thick slice of lemon. Be extra careful not to lose any cola from bubbles fizzing up past the rim of the glass. Now, take a long, well-earned drink. Mmmm. That was refreshing wasn’t it?
Okay now for the fire bit. On the bottom of a Coke can, or indeed the bottom of any drink can, is a small concaved area of exposed aluminum with a slightly rough matte finish. What you need to do is turn this rough area into a polished reflector so as to harness and magnify the sun’s rays onto whatever surface you wish to light (best not to try this on a four-foot-thick log, so I suggest a small highly combustible material like char cloth).
This is where the chocolate comes in. Since it is slightly abrasive, you can use the chocolate as a polish to buff up the rough concaved surface to the point where it has a mirror finish and you can see your face in it, which if you’ve bought this book is no doubt a highly attractive face—and even more so if you recommend it to a friend or give it five stars on Amazon.com. It’s important to note here that you should never eat the chocolate after you’ve used it, for it will contain tiny fragments of aluminum from the can, which can make you very ill.
This polishing will probably take the best part of thirty minutes to complete. All you need now is some sunshine, and you’ll be as happy as a dog with two dicks.
When you can get a fire going this way or from rubbing two sticks together, it makes using a lighter or matches child’s play—not that you’d want to give a child a lighter or matches to play with, but I digress.
After watching the Tehran lads try unsuccessfully to light their fire for the best part of ten minutes, I could stand no more and forcibly took control of the situation. I should have started from scratch and relaid the whole fire, but I didn’t want to get filthy taking off all the charcoal they’d already placed on top. Instead, I stuffed loads of the paper into all the available spaces and built a small teepee of pencil thickness twigs around it. It got going first time.
Everybody congratulated me as if I’d performed some incredible feat, and I was now assigned the task of manning the fire and getting it good and hot. Whilst I took charge of this, Pedram told me he was going off to buy some alcohol nearby. I wondered where on earth he could get it out here in the countryside, as surely it was the sort of thing you needed contacts to acquire. I didn’t ask questions though, and fifteen minutes later, when the barbecue was in full swing, he returned with a couple of bottles of vodka. We all sat around and got stuck into succulent chicken and tomato kebabs served in soft folded naan bread. It was wonderful food, and although I couldn’t communicate much with the guys, it was still great to be sharing their company and this meal together.
When we finished the first round of kebabs, Pedram poured out a round of huge shots of vodka into little plastic cups, which he then mixed with cherry juice. Three of the guys abstained, and after smelling it, I could well understand why. Its aroma was totally overpowering and sent an involuntary shiver up my spine. I wondered what the quality of the stuff was like, but didn’t have long to ponder this, as on the count of three, we knocked it back.
As soon as I swallowed, I was grabbing my throat and gasping for breath. I’d never tasted anything so strong. It was horrendously powerful and as harsh as hell on the gullet. I wasn’t the only one making wincing expressions, and Behzad in particular looked in a bad way. I turned to Pedram and asked in a croaking voice where on earth he’d got the vodka. He answered simply that he had bought it at a shop.
This was weird. I asked how it could possibly be the case, as surely vodka was highly illegal. “No,” he said, and continued, struggling a bit with the translation, “you can buy for medical purpose to put on… how you say, cuts.”
Fuck me! I was drinking a first aid kit! My eyes nearly popped out when I now looked at the bottle for the first time and saw that it was not vodka, but said on the label in big capital letters ETHANOL. It was a staggering 96 percent alcohol. I was speechless and couldn’t believe I’d just drunk surgical spirit. I explained to Pedram that only an alcoholic living on the street would consider drinking such stuff back home. He thought this was very funny, as did the other guys whom he translated for, and explained that it was a normal beverage in Tehran.
I was roped into having a further three shots, and by the time I’d finished these, I was feeling suitably drunk. After loads more food to soak the booze up, Ali and I staggered back to his nearby car for a much-needed lie down. The rest of the lads remained behind crashing out on the carpet. They all returned just as it was getting dark, carrying the carpet, the mats, the skewers, and a few other bits and pieces but none of the plastic bottles, plastic trays, cups, or anything else disposable we’d used.
I might have been drunk, but the day I leave a load of trash knowingly out in nature is the day I die. I’m of the opinion that you should not only leave an area as you find it but try to leave it better, so this went completely against my principles. I asked Pedram where all the trash was and he said not to worry as they’d left it in “the place where you leave rubbish.”
“Like hell you have,” I thought, and told them I’d go and fetch it. They all tried to persuade me not to bother. I was determined to get it, but also wanted them to help me out, after all it was all our stuff so we should all go and get it. I tried to explain this but I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I decided to try a different approach and lied by saying, “It is a sin for a Christian to leave trash. It is a very bad sin for me to do this.” Surprisingly, or perhaps not, they all respected this and agreed to help me out now. We went back to the “place where you leave rubbish,” which turned out to be in the middle of the dried up riverbed. Interestingly all of the rubbish was bagged up, so they’d gone to the effort of doing this, but for some reason hadn’t brought it back to the car.
Not only did we clear our stuff up, but Ali even picked up a couple of bottles from nearby that weren’t ours. We dumped it all in the trunk of the car, and I felt much better. Before we left, it was decided there was time to finish off the ethanol with a further two rounds, this time served with lemonade. From now on, things all got a bit hazy, and I have no idea how Pedram or Ali managed to drive after so much raw booze. But drive they did, or at least they sped and raced each other like a couple of maniacs with a death wish. They zigzagged in and out of traffic on the darkened motorway and seemed to get more and more fired up as the music pumped away at a deafening volume. This time it was dance music, including t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” in Russian—class!
In my intoxicated state, I simply didn’t care about the driving and was singing away in the back to the music like a total idiot. Things got really crazy when at high speed both cars pulled up alongside each other on the crowded highway so we could all give high fives to the other car’s occupants. It was total madness, and had I been sober it would have been a completely different story but after several surgical spirit spritzers, I was loving it.
When we sped past an army barracks, everyone, including myself, yelled drunken abuse at it out of the window. And the lads had good reason to do so as they’d all soon become much better acquainted with the army when they finished their studies and started compulsory military service. The irony is that if Iran is ever invaded then Pedram, Ali, Behzad, and my other friends will all be called up to defend their country, and if they die they’ll be written off in the West as expendable “legitimate military targets,” not civilian deaths. With the way Iran is constantly demonized in the media, I fear this may become the case. For just like the American and British lies over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, much the same is now happening to Iran over its alleged “nuclear ambitions,” despite the fact that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found zero evidence that Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.
Under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has every right to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian purposes, and according to the IAEA, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has ever deviated from this. The organization’s head, Dr. ElBaradei, has reiterated this fact repeatedly and stated that his inspectors have for the most part been allowed to “go anywhere and see anything.” Pakistan, India, and Israel all developed their nuclear arsenals clandestinely and refuse to sign the NPT, but since their governments are buddies with the U.S. and Britain, no one makes much of a fuss. Such double standards are not lost on the Iranian people.
What the U.S. and Israel craftily demand of Iran is to somehow
