It’s barbecue time, and clouds of smoke and pillars of fire rise from backyards and balconies. But not, it must be said, from mine.

I’ve quit the barbecue business. Indeed, some people who have tasted my offerings would say I was never truly in it. They may well be right.

I started my barbecue career many years ago, when I collected a few lumps of charcoal and bought three steaks and a small tabletop barbecue. Then, I bought a case of beer and invited some friends. I set up the barbecue and fuelled it with perhaps six or eight briquettes. When that didn’t look to be enough, I tossed in some wood chips. I didn’t have any fire-starter fluid, so I lit each piece of charcoal by hand. Then, after about five minutes, I threw on the steaks. That’s because I felt I needed full burning value from the charcoal.

You can see where this is going. I think those three thin steaks took two hours. And they were not so much cooked as smoked, turning a pale tan color. I have no recollection of whether they were eaten, but I do know we finished the beer.

This set the pattern for years of failure at the barbecue. Once, I decided to barbecue in the firepit at the cottage where I usually burned driftwood. I had the hamburgers but no actual barbecue, so I started my wood fire and put the hamburgers on a wire rack taken from my old fridge. It seemed to me that it would work. I was partly right.

I balanced my homemade grill on some stones and my hamburgers rapidly burst into flame – I had learned that heat is needed for cooking. I put on my chainsaw gloves for insulation and managed to turn the burgers over. But, when I lifted the rack, they slid off into the grass. I could have coped with that had not my dog emerged from the weeds and attacked them. I saved four of the eight burgers and, when I served them, I left out the part about the dog.

And that was the last time I cooked with a wire refrigerator shelf.

Much of my barbecue work over the years involved roiling clouds of smoke and sheets of flame. For a year or two, I was partial to lamb chops. Cooking them was such a perilous business that I never did any in the city. And when I cooked some at the cottage, boaters would cruise by to investigate the clouds of smoke. It seems that lamb chops catch fire instantly and that flame can be controlled only by slamming down the barbecue’s lid. Then, when you open it to see what is going on, the smoke billows forth. Those chops actually did get cooked, but they came out black and crunchy and I haven’t cooked another chop in 20 years.

Anyone who has seen me dancing around a flaming barbecue knows, I need help. Once, when I was trying to cook on an old-style charcoal barbecue for a group of people at our house on a rainy day, two of them came outside and volunteered that they could do a better job. They herded me away and took over. One was an English professor; the other a social worker – and I am sure that makes a statement. Exactly what, I don’t know.

Oddly enough, although I no longer cook on the barbecue, I have one of those machines that look like the cockpit of a Boeing Dreamliner. I paid real money for it seven years ago, when we had guests in the country who wanted to barbecue. “You should have a real barbecue,” they said, so we all went out and bought one. Plus a tank of propane.

We brought this contraption back, set it up and one of my guests barbecued eight hamburgers. I estimate they cost me $82 dollars each. He also did some zucchini and peppers. And they were good.

When I tried my hand at this machine a few days later, my pork chops burst into flame and my zucchini fell through the grill and crisped itself to death on the fake coals.

It was at this point that I retired from the barbecue wars.IE

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