Mum sorts through the cards and throws them one by one into the fire. Some of them miss and land on the red clay tiles. Some of them land right in the middle of the flames and stay there for a long time before they start to curl up at the corners and go black.

There's one card which makes Mum laugh, because she says it looks like her. I don't think it does at all. The card looks like this:

She keeps it back for a while and doesn't burn it. But later we start throwing whole boxes of cards and things onto the fire, and we both forget about the card and it must end up getting burned, because pretty much everything does.