Finding warmth

Dear Gilly,

I did enjoy our warble on Sunday. Never could I have imagined two years ago that I would be an alto in a village choir. Not that I am an alto, or a soprano, or a singer at all, but kind of you to assure me that in five weeks time Linda will have sorted that all out and I will be one small part of a beautiful melody. I never imagined that singing could be so difficult, nor did I know that the tunes that most of us recognise and sing along to are often the soprano bits. Laughton Lovelies were sopranos and strange that we Ladies of The Dicker (including you) were the Altos; it was quite clan-like. Villages and choirs...how very English, how timeless, I thought, how unexpectedly exciting to be part of it. But to my children - how very middle-aged.

My father arrived to stay for the week on Sunday evening. He came with food poisoning, poor thing. When you come from 3,000 miles away with food poisoning what you really need is a lavatory, warmth and a washing machine. We could offer none of these things: the downstairs lavatory and the washing machine broke last week. On the same day our heating oil completely ran dry. So last night I lit the Aga. I have been holding out as long as possible because it turns me into a schizophrenic. On the one hand it was one of my favourite features of the house when we first viewed it, but I know that it is an environmental sin to run it. I remember Dave saying how he liked the really old Agas and he's not known for his sentimentality. I think ours dates from the 1950's and when we moved it hadn't been used for years. I begged Dave to mend it, so he did. But now he would have it ripped out in an instant. To him it's yet another Bloody Thing...and our lives are filled with Bloody Things - tables that graced grandmotherly kitchens and won't fit through doors; sofas and chairs with springs abounding; flotsam and jetsam that we trail along behind us from one house to the next. To me, however, it has every right to be there and the house wouldn't be the same without it. It sits stubbornly at the end of the kitchen with dinner medals down its front like some cantankerous old relative guzzling coal and then refusing to cook anything.

Since we moved to Starnash I have become aware of how much fuel it takes to keep us comfortable. It is not even particularly cold for the time of year but without central heating the inside of the house is the same temperature as the outside and we're just not accustomed to it. Two days ago we had a large wood pile out in the yard. To build that wood pile Dave and a friend took a day to fell a dead tree, transport it and split it into logs. That's quite a lot of hard work and energy to get the fuel in the first place. It has taken only a few days use up almost the entire wood pile. During half term I came down first thing every morning before the children were up and lit a fire in the sitting room which is a small enough room to be tinged by the warmth of the fire. I felt like a parlour maid.

In the kitchen is our strange wood burning stove which we picked up for a tenner from a farm sale. It is not a pretty thing. It looks like a reject from the Soviet Union's brutalist years. We now know why it went so cheaply: it is a phenomenon of inefficiency. I feel like Casey Jones when I stoke it, throwing wood on as fast as I can, it burns with fierce promise and yet it never gets hot. Last night we had three of us tending fires simultaneously. This sounds like extreme inefficiency and wastefulness and I only mention it to say that all that effort, all that fuel, amounted to almost no change of temperature in the house and yet when I flick the central heating thermostat up to 21 degrees on passing (when we have fuel) the whole house is warm within minutes. It makes you think, doesn't it?

I have just been to check on the Aga. I have raked the ashes from its bottom and tentatively fed it a few tasty morsels of coal. I peeped over the red hot fuel chamber and it shot out a tongue of blue flame at me followed by a belch of black smoke. Charming! It is a difficult beast...you have to build it up at just the right time of day so that it is hot enough to cook a meal with. Too much coal and you either put it out or super-heat it and strictly speaking to give its existence any justification I should be thinking of ways to use it twenty four hours a day when alight. I should be baking loaves of bread and cakes, there should be a casserole on the hot plate, clothes should be airing above and the water for a family bath should be drawn off after the meal (as it takes away all the heat for cooking). Even used like this, it is still an environmental saboteur which is why I fuss about it, hissing at it to behave when Dave is around muttering in the background about scrap metal and super efficient German wood burners.

I just had to have a little rant. It is only a few days until our bonfire party and I look out of the window and can only describe the weather as being in a strop. It looks set in, the wind blowing any which way and the rain splashing messily against the window panes. As I look out I can't imagine it being any other way. Perhaps we will all snuggle round our fires indoors after all. But no matter what, we will have a party!

See you then, or maybe at Lewes Bonfire on Thursday - we have never been, and I think it is a must.

With love, Vx