It’s the smell of summer. That familiar whiff of smoke. The bursts of light. Flickering serpents’ tongues licking up the oxygen.

I remember reading survivalist books when I was a kid. We lived in rural Arizona and went camping a lot. There was always some actual risk of needing to know how to survive in the wild. So I learned all of the ways to build a fire. An easy task when you live in the Arizona desert. The scent of a campfire was as ever-present as the smell of DEET-rich insect repellent we covered our bodies in.

Now that I’ve got my own kids, it feels nice to finally have a fire pit of our own, here in Scotland. Nothing big, just enough for us to huddle around. To cook if we want to. To make it feel a bit like the summers I had as a kid.

Because summer just isn’t fun when you’re grown up.