Aladdin fires

Pinterest brought this picture to my attention this morning, of what seems to be two Aladdin paraffin fires somewhere in Iraq.

Identical to the two such fires which we owned when we were first married and used to fire up our bedsitter near Harringay West railway station, now known as plain Harringay. Then home to a fine foreign butcher who sold Baby Belling ready joints of beef. And a public library from which we took our Trollope. Identical that is up to the fuel guage, at the front of the tank of the right hand fire, which came in two, slightly different, varieties.

We hung onto the fires for many years, and they only made it to the tip after we arrived in Epsom, by which time they had not been used for perhaps 20 years. Although not too sure on that point as I do remember that one could still buy pink paraffin in the hardware store then in Pound Lane, when we first arrived, and may well have done so. Now long gone.

The other people whom I knew to have such fires were the Census people, who had a large stock of them standing ready to fire up their offices in Segensworth Road in Titchfield, against the possibility of heating oil failure during the winter of discontent, back in the 1970's.

Rather a low resolution picture, so I tried google image search, which came up with half a dozen more or less identical copies of the same picture. It guessed Baghdad as the origin of this particular one. So not that smart as it did not come up with any other pictures of the same fires, of which one supposes that there must be plenty, floating about somewhere or other out there. It presumably does not get as far as working out that there are two fires, detaching them from their background and poking around for something similar. Rather, it works at a whole picture level.

PS: I also remember being rather sorry when we got rid of ours. They were very well made things and it seemed a pity for them to go for scrap metal. Rather in the same way as I am sorry when I see one of those fine electric typewriters which used to be made by IBM sitting all forlorn in a car boot sale. But what on earth could one do with such a thing? Where would one put it?

PPS: the last time I noticed stoves or the paraffin that went in them seems to have around ten years ago at reference 1, with the older of the two posts there recording a failure to visit the tip with them. With the story there much the same as that here, which is a relief, with the only down point being that I had been expecting something rather more recent. Perhaps my searching is not up to much.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=paraffin.