COMBUSTIBLE WALKING

Did you see this in the London Evening Standard?  Spontaneous human combustion is one of those things that I look into every now and then in a brief intense way and then forget about.  Still, I don’t think I ever heard of anybody combusting while walking.

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Man bursts into flames and dies in front of horrified onlookers while walking down London street

Specialist fire investigators found no obvious reason why John Nolan, 70, might have caught alight

         JUSTIN DAVENPORT Crime Editor

                          

 

John Nolan, 70, caught fire in a street in Haringey and died

Police today appealed for witnesses after a man died after catching fire as he walked down a street in north London 

Passers-by saw John Nolan, 70, ablaze in a street in Haringey in the middle of the day and attempted to put out the flames before calling police and fire crews.

The former construction worker, who was originally from County Mayo in Ireland, was taken to a specialist hospital but died later.

Today detectives said his death was being treated as unexplained. There were no accelerants found on his body and specialist fire investigators could find no obvious reason for Mr Nolan to catch alight.

Mr Nolan, who lived in Haringey, was found in Orchard Place at 1pm on Sunday September 17 after calls from the public.

PC Damien Ait-Amer, who is investigating the death, said: “We have spoken with a number of witnesses who saw Mr Nolan ablaze, but we have yet to establish how the fire started.

“Mr Nolan was a well-liked member of the community and none of our enquiries so far have indicated that he had been involved in a dispute of any sort. Nor does any account given by witnesses suggest that he had been in contact with another person at the time of the fire.” 

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Most of the literature will tell you there’s no such thing as SHC, and Charles Dickens often gets the blame for spreading the urban myth.  He seems to have believed in it, not least as a plot device:  in Bleak House  Mr. Krook, a man in the recycling trade, does indeed die that way, though not while walking. This from Dickens’ 1853 preface to the novel.

“The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at page 30, vol. ii., the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.”

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Alcohol is often given as a factor in SHC, as in this cartoon - the large sign for Old Tom 

suggests that Pa had been knocking back the gin.  It also suggests he was walking at the 

time. 

BALLS AND SPOTLIGHTS

I was walking in LA, by the Beverly Center, which has been refurbished at a cost of $500 million and does look very slightly better than it did before, and I looked in the window of Macy’s and took a picture, arguably a selfie. (The “foregrounding” of the gut is caused by the nature of spherical reflections, honest.):

And then I started thinking of a picture I took when I was walking in Greece near the (unrefurbished) Acropolis some forty years ago.   See how my aesthetic focus has remained stable (i.e. undeveloped) over the years.  And yes, I know there was never any excuse for the tie-dye and those shorts.

OUR BREWS ARE IN THE GUTTER

You can walk a long way before you see this kind of thing. I’d walked as far as Dayton Way, which is in Beverly Hills.  Posh area, right.

And I saw these two things at the side of the road, one black and one silver, and there was absolutely nobody around and I thought they’d been dumped there, and it's possible that they had, but they’d evidently been in use till very, very recently, and in fact it seemed they still contained coffee (at least it definitely looked like coffee) which was even now pouring out into the gutter. 

I’m sure there was a story here, an explanation, but I reckon it was probably far less intriguing than the sight of them just sitting there, dispensing coffee into oblivion.

WALKING ON CARPET

I was walking past a used car lot on Hollywood Boulevard, and being the language obsessive that I am, my eye was drawn to the words displayed on the windshields of the cars; shout lines, I suppose, or possibly selling lines.  All of them were hand painted in good old fashioned signwriters’ script, the kind of thing you used to see on the windows of butchers and fruit shops.  You, or I, might have thought it was a dead art, but evidently not.

This was cheering in some small way but then I started wondering, did the person who did the painting have to come up with the words?  If not, who did?  Some hotshot salesman who thinks he knows what sells? 

And of course I also wondered whether the company had a stock of generic phrases that they used over and over again, or whether they were constantly trying to come up with new words, new combinations, new poetry.  I shall be keeping an eye on things as I walk past there in the future.

Then, at the weekend, I went to the annual LA Auto Show. I hadn’t been for years, and I can’t say I’d missed it much, but this seemed a reasonable moment in history to go and see what, if anything, had changed.

It was an interesting walking experience.  You walk slowly for miles, not quite lost but not quite knowing how to get where you want to be, surrounded by other slow moving, equally not-quite-lost walkers.  Much of the time you’re walking on some very fancy, and I suppose industrial grade, carpet.  Probably this makes the walking a bit easier. 

And of course there are the poor spokesmodels who have to stand by the cars hour after hour, and they probably don’t walk very far, but given those heels, their feet must be in tatters at the end of the day. In fact there were considerably fewer of these poor women than there used to be; progress, right?

There wasn’t a whole lot of language on display at the show, though such as there was had its raw appeal:

And you could also pick up some very expensively printed car brochures which were full of auto verbiage.  I learn for example that the GMC Terrain Denali “is the SUV reimagined with you in mind.”  Me?  You’d think they’d have told me sooner, wouldn’t you?  Anyway, none of this auto language was nearly as zesty or as much fun as that painted on the windshields of the cars on Hollywood Boulevard.  A lesson there for somebody.