Last Boxing Day (that's the day after Xmas for those who don't have one)
I was in a local bar with three of my friends. I don't smoke myself, but the
others all did and one of them, Porky, showed us this bar game. You take a box
of matches and pierce the top of it with one unlit match, so that this match
sticks vertically up out of the top (i.e. the only side that doesn't have
contact with the drawer underneath so that it can still open and close). The
challange is to take the box in your hand and with just that one hand open the
box, take out a match, light it and then light the match on top with the match
you have just struck.
Turned out the hardest bit was getting the match
struck with enough force to ignite it but not so much that it carries on and you
burn yourself in the palm of the hand (try it and you'll see what I mean!). So
me, Porky and one of the other guys had been sitting trying this for about
fifteen minutes but mostly kept burning ourselves. Then Toomba, the guy who up
to this point had just been watching, decided he would have a go. We were happy
to sit back and nurse our burns while he took a blast at it. So, he takes the
box in his hand and pokes it open with a finger. He then takes a match out WITH
HIS OTHER HAND and procedes to do it and then gloat at his "success" assuming
our astonished faces were because his genius brain had cracked it - ignore the
"do it with one hand" bit!
