The main obsessive tasks for the winter are ensuring we always have enough dry and seasoned firewood in the cellar for our needs and then getting the fire lit at the right time so that the living room and bedrooms warmed by the wood burner are comfortable when we need them to be without using more wood than we need to.
First the firewood itself. We burn mainly chestnut, as there is a lot of standing deadwood on the coppiced chestnut stools in the One Acre Wood, and it gives out a good heat and burns cleanly. I should point out that we can only burn chestnut as we have an enclosed wood burning stove, as chestnut does spit a lot. Our living room can sound a bit like a war zone at times.
Then there is the marking up, cutting down, chopping into the right lengths, splitting large segments, stacking to dry, stacking to transport and stacking in the cellar before it finally makes its way into the wood basket under the stove and then into the fire itself. It has been estimated that in the most efficient systems, one piece of firewood is handled at least 9 times, so that will be a lot more for us as we are still novices!
Then there is the whole science of building and controlling the fire so that it burns just right - to my mind this is very much Man Work, but that could just be me being a bit pathetic and not liking to move out of my armchair much in the evening.
Everyone is a critic as well, and we all have our foibles. We like to see the flames and aren't too worried about banking the fire up to last all night, others will try to keep it going all night and will have a thick deposit of tar on the window. The cats like a nice rosy glow that they can get as close to as possible without singeing anything - Shelley was particularly fussy about this (see photo), but Maigret and Poirot are younger and therefore easier to please.
Anyway, as dusk descends, it is time to get that fire set, ready for a cosy winter evening.
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