The Stove

Today I gave the sitting room a good hoover and did a bit of dusting - the first time I've really been up to it for a while, but it's nice to have things a bit cleaner.

As part of the clean I moved the clothes horses which usually hide the wood-burning stove (we're so short of space, having so much stuff, that there really isn't anywhere else to put them).

We haven't had a fire in here for ages, partly because we need to get the chimney swept, partly because we'd need to get wood to burn, partly because it heats the downstairs and leaves the upstairs even more freezing, but mainly I suspect because neither of us is very good at the whole fire laying, lighting, cleaning thing.

We did use it one Christmas when we had visitors and we rearranged the whole room and it was very nice, and we also used it once when the heating totally packed up - although we had no wood so we burnt old Argos catalogues and Radio Timeses in order to keep warm!

We've had one really successful fire at our house - in the cooker. An incident with some cheap beefburgers and the grill pan meant that I looked up from my dinner to see foot-high flames emerging from the cooker. A 999 call, two noisy fire engines in our very quiet village (late at night) and lots of burly firemen later, it was safely out - took me about a week of solid cleaning to clear up the soot!

If you ever need really good effective cheap firelighters, then I recommend value beefburgers! Don't try to eat them though - we only resorted to them at the time because we were both out of work and living on no income. Now we have the luxury of a little money coming in we wouldn't touch them with a bargepole!

However, given our track record with fires, maybe it's just as well we keep the clothes horses in front of the stove!