Sitting outside a bar at the weekend, I noticed something coming out of my bag that looked and also smelled a lot like a naked flame. Ordinarily, I’d have thought it was my vape, but it couldn’t have been, since that was in my mouth. So I put it down to a mirage created by the clement weather, and thought no more of it until someone much smarter than me said: “Your bag’s on fire.”
It was my remarkable good fortune to be sitting opposite a friend who is a chemistry teacher, and explained what had happened through a laborious sequence of rhetorical questions. What is a spare vape battery made of? What are keys made of? What happens to a lithium battery when you connect something metal to each end? What is the result of closing a circuit inside a handbag? Not only had I set my bag alight; I’d melted my keyring, which for complicated reasons held a plastic portrait of both my nieces circa 2017, and it was yet more bad luck that I was also sitting opposite my sister, who, in fairness, reacted surprisingly well to the sight of her molten children.
