Friday 3rd December
Brrr it’s cold! We have been blanketed in snow here for several days now and the nights have been really cold. We have swapped onto Supertherm coal instead of Taybright because it seems to burn hotter and stays in better.
Actually, I had a bit of a pyrotechnical disaster the other day when a red hot coal somehow escaped from the fire and exploded on to the floor in lots of pieces. While I was frantically collecting up these pieces another piece was quietly setting fire to the wooden hearth surround! The resultant several burn marks on the wooden floor and the runner, not to mention the burned fire surround, meant I was not flavour of the month with the other half! My problem was that I was piling the fire up too high in order to get it to stay in better and chuck out more heat but this meant it was decidedly unstable when I poked it and I had previously had lesser disasters with red hot coals.
I am pleased to report that I have found a solution to this problem – I have installed a second front grille so I can have a deeper fire and hot coals can’t fall out over the top when I am poking it. I wonder why I didn’t think of this before!
Apart from this incident things have been going ok. Our tap has been frozen for a week but there is a free one at the facilities block where we can fill our containers. These would be the containers we bought last year – after we got caught out with the weather and got stuck with no water for a week in Nottingham!
George is quite sprightly despite the cold and is enjoying his trips to the pub, where he falls asleep in front of the fire until it is time to go then we have to drag him out of the door! He has speeded up a bit on the journey to and from the village and we now take 20 mins instead of half an hour!
