welsh hills again

Today I have a heavy head cold.  I woke this morning to light snow on the hills and in the garden.  I had a hammering headache and streaming nose and eyes.  This was not a day for venturing out.  It was a day for sitting by the stove, snoozing, doing a little comfort reading.  I couldn't even find the concentration to knit.  But the day has passed away in a warm and comforting way because of our woodburning stove. We have been using this stove for three seasons a year for nine years now and I could light the fire in my sleep. I start with quite a bit of scrumpled paper.  We use a broadsheet newspaper and I use about eight sheets.  I am pretty sure Ian uses fewer than that but that is what works for me!  Then kindling.  The kindling here was bought chopped during the period when Ian was languishing in bed with flu.  Normally he chops all ours.  How much kindling to use depends very much on how dry the logs are that we ...

I love bonfires.  When I was a child I loved fireworks too.  Now I can take them or leave them but a good fire is a wonderful thing.    We had a fire in the field the other night.  We had been piling wood up for a couple of weeks, prunings of shrubs, trimmings of the native hedges, brambles and bits of holly cut back from behind the shepherd's hut.    The woodpile was ready to light and the pallet was covered with perennial weed to burn when things got really hot. It was a pitchblack night, cold and wet with gusts of rain blowing  out of the darkness, snatching at the fire and hurling flame and smoke back into the blackness. Standing on the doorstep it was the kind of night to drive you back inside but we gathered our coats around us and set out across the black field.  Soon the centre of the fire was a mesmerising glow. Gusts of wind made it roar into sheets of flame.  Our faces were hot although the rain blew cold on our...

The middle section of our roof was taken off yesterday as the wind whipped round the house.  By the time I went out to work in the late afternoon the visquene which is keeping us watertight was thrumming in a near gale.  The trees around the house strained at their roots, the yews heaving and twisting, the sycamore lashing, suddenly leafless, in the wind.  The event I was attending was in a church now used for public meetings sometimes and all evening the wind roared above the vaulted roof.  I hoped my roof would still be there when I got home. When I came out the wind threw itself at me and bundled me down the steps.  I battled along the street to the carpark, the breath pummelled out of my chest, and fell into the car.  It was quiet and still with the door shut, disturbed only by an occasional rocking as the wind buffetted the side of the car.  I drove home through the whirling dark and was nearly at the bottom of our hill when I rounded a ben...