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judy smith Sep 2015
Cheap fancy dress costumes are to be subject to spot checks by trading standards inspectors, to avoid a repeat of the fire that seriously injured the daughter of the television presenter Claudia Winkleman.

Ministers have ordered the nationwide crackdown as thousands more children’s outfits and accessories, some of which are aimed at babies and toddlers, go on sale online and in supermarkets in the runup to Halloween.

The costumes, ranging from witches’ outfits to skeleton onesies, selling as cheaply as £6 each, will be subjected to flammability tests to assess whether they are compliant with safety standards.

The crackdown follows Winkleman’s warning about fancy dress costumes when her daughter suffered serious burns as her outfit, bought from a supermarket, caught fire. Winkleman questioned why the outfits were treated as toys rather than clothing when it came to safety tests.

The business secretary, Sajid Javid, said: “My immediate concern as a father and a minister is that children wearing these fancy dress costumes are safe. It is unacceptable for any costumes to be sold that do not comply with safety standards. That’s why I’ve granted funding to trading standards to carry out spot checks as part of a nationwide investigation. Parents should feel confident that any fancy dress they buy meets required standards.”

His department said it was working with the British Standards Institute to assess whether the applicable European safety controls needed to be more tough. Trading standards is to report back to the business secretary with their findings later in the autumn.

Sales of fancy dress costumes for children have soared in recent years, prompted by cheap imports being available and children increasingly wanting to dress as their favourite characters from blockbuster films. Halloween outfits have become more popular in the UKowing to the influence of American films and sitcoms. Supermarkets report that 31 October accounts for significantly more consumer spending than Bonfire night.

The dangers of the outfits were exposed in November last year when Winkleman’s eight-year-old daughter, Matilda, suffered serious burns when her witch costume caught alight. The outfit – a hat, cape, striped tights and flowing skirt – bought at a supermarket, was ignited by a flame.

Winkleman, host of the BBC show Strictly Come Dancing, said on Thursday: “We’re extremely happy the government are taking action on this and we’re so grateful to the supermarkets who are selling safer costumes.”

Some retailers have agreed to go further than minimum standards, after a recent investigation launched by Winkleman with the BBC1 series Watchdog. Tesco, Aldi, Asda, Morrisons, and Sainsbury’s, all responded to the investigation by stating that their fancy dress outfits for children would meet the equivalent of the higher fire safety standards required for youngsters’ nightwear.

A spokesman for Sainsbury’s said: “We have looked at every detail of our children’s dress-up range in creating our new standard and believe that it will be industry leading. This has not been a simple task, but the safety of children is our number one priority and introducing more rigorous safety standards for our children’s dress-up is the right thing to do.

“All clothing carries some fire risk, but we hope that introducing our own rigorous testing standards that test clothes as clothes rather than as toys will be the first step towards safer testing across the industry.”

read more:www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-perth

www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney
aquanerine May 2019
a sky with a gradient of blue to grey
it followed red minds
glowing through a burning gaze
eyes pointed at me
and yet I wondered,
why do I see ashes behind you?

once I was engulfed
I still had to be sorry; I couldn't be angry
so you witnessed my tears instead
and yet I wondered,
was it as painful for you?

extinguished to smoke
recovery took seconds
you simply ran beyond me
and yet I wondered,
why was I the only one who still couldn't breathe?
neth jones Feb 2022
contaminated...                            

the boy is explained in the dark
                  made smaller and tighter than his thirteen years
        invented a-tread each direful night ;
            in place of restfulness
                   he is tussled :

itchy within                                    
moans of a growth owning pain
domestic air is newly surrogate
the boy flees upstairs
the condition of the home is sickly
             excreted beads from the fibres
a pale mix is gland
                        a perspiration out of sorts
pursed
spritzed
lively          
            then a wing-ed light smog

keeping to his room                            
he sits on his bed to 'wait it out'
the sun downs                        
as fruited ideas                
                   treacle up the pine wood walls
as otherworld tones        
                             flute the flumes that plumb the walls
as his mother clears the dishes
        with the radio on
as the fathers increasing tardiness
        makes the wound hour leaden further

outside
wind starts churning up the monster
hustling the coniferous trees
stoking the forrest for its brazen voice
jeeving hard upon the house
dry *******
inducing a perverse osmosis
within                                              
          pressurized audibility is clayed
hairs on the carpet tick static
              ....  this negative duress

outside
the moon hides its legend            
an autumn owl takes the bough
     just above the boys window
    it hunches into its ruffle
       retches up a pellet of prey
fur and crushed bone
            clatters dryly into the gutter

the boy works his jaw
       relieving his popping ears
the rooms climate becomes sparky
important items radiate auras :
             the scorpion in formaldehyde
stolen from school
                          grandmas mourning ring on a string
                suspended above his desk
        an old key discovered in  the woods

investigation                          
a brief hole in sound
a slim bik of light traverses
  over the boy
    the bed
       and out into the hallway
it winks gone
     and sips of smoke
like lithe neat scraps of silk
start livening the corners of vision

he stands                                                      
open­s his closest and dresses for sleep
      yield to routine

Mother enters                              
    always a human breath                  
                                         of pre decay warmth
      here to make him into his bed
bound by her neat practiced tucks
                         the boy receives her loving words
                                  but she's in a separated world from his
distortion gums up the audibility          
he attends to lips
the blessings don't function right
mistress smudges are left in the air            
they trail from the corners of her mouth
                             with the expressive turns of her head

fending lightly from the room
she blows a kiss at the doorway
it punches a little galaxy swirl
                              and suspends
a heated blue weave of the hand
                    and she is gone

door concluded and the light left on
the wall flower patterns crick and shale loose
    they cash into the flooring
and in turn the floorboards palpitate finely
feathering into a unreliable state

less than a minute later ...                   
fathers presence                              
   makes an apologetic attempt
                                                     at a ghost-walk
sounds clumbered in an aquarium                
    he slides his back down the drunken partition
and talks
   he sells a story of personal wretchedness
some lesson is vague
flammability
the boy takes the readings                  
                  of the distant vocal squall
pauses in the erratic speech weather expect replies  
     but the boy fears this colonized version of the father

though anger
                        father does not enter
rumbles his fists, feet              
                 and frustration at the wall
stands                                            
      and­ punches his footfalls
                  to the master bedroom

the parents
together now closeted
amniotic             
their world fidgets fiercely and swells          
swaddled in their own dramatics
firing blindly                        
their voices
travel the pipes in the walls
back to the boys room
                drowned of discourse
but not the aggressive 'passion' flaring out
they plunder the boys ears

Sudden ! ;                
                  brakked smell of flint
a bird slams the window dead        
crack in the pressure
unbearable penetrating release
screaming the boy host violent
minds that bind are loosened
subpoenaed                                              ­
          the boy recoils and fends this raid
kicks off the bedding
strips free of his pyjamas
a thick layer of his own goes with it
fleecing his actual skin                        
raw stinging exposure
he tugs at the flay of his own rubbery peel
enough layers of dermis in one
grip and pull
to make real hurt
raw of pain
(it feels)
tug-tug
grip
and pull
sleeves off of limbs
and a sappy caul from his bonce
he doffs the leather onto the floor
fresh wash of song
fierce waves of signals hot and cool
he ***** up his matty sheered hide
"**** it !"
pulls up the window enough
vent
an outward 'gush' as the pressure balances
the boy                        
dispose    
      push the viscid pelt out
the boy expels
disgorged into the night

                                              - consummated
Lora Lee May 2016
Sometimes
the burning
is so powerful
that I
might as
well be
tied to a stake
like the pagan
wise-women of yore
mistaken for witches
no dousing
with gasoline
necessary
for the inside
is already so
slick with
simmering
flammability
combustable
liquids
that trickle
down my thighs
into the earth
and create dark steam
that turns into light
as its luscious
vapor rising
from my being
Soon I will
simply evaporate
and become
atmospheric
ether floating
up towards
stars
and raining
love down
into the
tender receptacle
of your
being
So many sizzling emotions :)
JW Dec 2013
Spring teaches us
About innocent romance
Summer
About unsated lust
Autumn
About a lover's warming embrace
And winter
About the art of smoking cigarettes slower
For humidity tends to **** up tobacco's flammability.
ConnectHook Mar 2017
Poetic Pyromania to prepare for NaPoWriMo 2017

Haunted by data, hounded by blog-bots, assailed by algorithms, poets have been reduced to human resources, fractionated, monetized and commodified like petrochemical residues of the antediluvian world. In keeping with that metaphor imposed upon us by ourselves, we await a mere spark to begin consuming our own fuel, flaming voraciously into poetic combustion. Through this incendiary process, we liberate the very energy that an unpoetic world seeks to label, quantify and merchandize. Flame, however, cannot be commodified—only intensified, suppressed, or extinguished. Elemental fire may be started by lightning, produced by physical friction, electro-chemical reaction, or started from a pre-existing blaze. Poetry is similar; whether sent from God as a bolt of epiphany, a spontaneous combustion, or as a transposed flame inspired by anterior works, April is our month for playing with metaphysical fire. It is thus that we, as elemental (or just mental ) poets, refuse, at all levels (lyrical, cultural, mercantile, geologic, celestial and infernal, etc.) to be co-opted, commodified, and/or in any way politically corrected.

We poetic oilmen and women are the active nihilists of a nihilistic era. We locate promising sites, then we draw up, from below the poetic bedrock, raw inspiration. NaPoWriMo allows us to drill deep into the sedimentary layers of poetry and tap into the deposits of lyrical fuel trapped within. Some gets pumped up, some comes gushing spontaneously to the surface in a crude form. It can then be refined to varying degrees of flammability and into differing types of fuel; think diesel versus jet fuel… one will take you further faster, but both are indeed fuel.

As oilmen and women, we pump our precious resource up in raw form from subterranean seas—the remains of lyric flora and fauna of a previous age buried under the silt of an inundation of data-driven global dullness. Through sheer creative will we set these deposits ablaze, to produce, out of the incoherent night that surrounds us, poetic illumination. In the light of our own flame, we cerebrate the utter uselessness of our artistic product—by continuing to create it, refine it, and then burn it up in a transcendent pyre of irrelevance. Thus, we wage uncompromising war against the powers and principalities of technoid global dominion. Our useless words, unread and unwanted, undermine the process of attempted global conquest by the unpoetic Enemy.
It's not a POEM really...
more a poetic screed. But sure was fun writing it !

Come over to my place soon:
https://connecthook.wordpress.com/


National Poetry Writing Month is almost here.

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