When Poetry Lovers Attack

You know how it is - it's a winter's night, you've had a few drinks, it's getting late, and the conversation turns to poetry and prose, relative merits thereof. Your friend asserts that prose, not poetry, is the only 'real literature' - so, poetry lover that you are, you grab a knife and stab him. We've all been there... No we haven't, but that is what happened recently in a small Russian town deep in the Urals. The Russians take such arguments very seriously; it's not long since a lively discussion of Immanuel Kant ended when one of the debaters shot the other with an air gun. But my favourite case of a drunken discussion getting out of hand occurred on home soil a couple of years ago. The subject was white spirit, flammability thereof, and to prove his point that no way was the stuff flammable, one party doused himself in white spirit and applied a match. Whoops - or rather Whoosh.