Winter in France is coming
Apparently we have just had the warmest autumn since 1950 in southern France, which has been pleasant for all concerned. Except the oil and gas companies, who have presumably been sat there hoping the phone will ring with an order, instead of the normal deluge of calls they get in October and November. (Yes, we all get oil and gas delivered for heating around here, rather than it arriving unseen beneath the ground.)
But now at last it’s a bit chillier. It is a shame in a way, because even as I write this I can see Mrs B shivering in the garden as she tries to finish off her bulb-planting / tree pruning or whatever it is that needs doing in a garden in December. But for me there is one great pleasure that arrives with cold weather - we can use the woodburning stove.
OK so we have central heating as well, but the woodstove is much more exciting to watch, and more fun to sit next to than a radiator - it makes you feel warm just looking at it.
There was one problem with a woodstove when we lived in the house - the room with the stove was always 15 degrees hotter than every other room in the house, so we felt cold when we left the room. A stove gives out 10-12 kilowatts, which is a lot for one room! But now we live in a barn, with more or less one big living space of 500 cubic metres, and the heat is pretty well spread out all over.
Like every year we had our battles when we tried to order wood for burning. We always wait until the last holidaymakers have left the gites before ordering our wood, because an enormous pile of wood blocking the parking spaces is a bit of a problem. So as a result we always order too late, and all the normal suppliers have run out.
Eventually we always track someone down who is happy to drive a couple of cubic metres of wood from the other side of the Massif central just so we don’t feel chilly, but as often as not it is the wood that no-one else would buy - too newly cut and damp, too old and dry, too big, too small etc.
Anyway, this years delivery is coming next week - four cubic metres (steres as we wood people call them) of fine oak, ready cut to length so I don’t need to pass Christmas Day with a broken chainsaw in hand, and we have plenty to see us through until then, so the fire is roaring.
We always have to keep a bit of a stock of wood anyway, because the two gites have woodstoves in as well, although they get used a bit less often than I’d expect. It’s a bit of a knack getting them going, so I suspect people try once, get no heat out, and turn on the electric heaters instead. Ah well, all the more wood for me!
Apparently in France there is more wood than you can poke a stick at, so to speak, because large amounts of previously agricultural land are now abandoned to trees and forests. So I don’t even need to feel guilty as I put another log on the fire. Less than half of the increase in tree numbers gets used each year, apparently, so if none of us had wood-burning fires, it would only be a matter of time until the whole of France became an impenetrable forest.
And before you ask, its non-polluting as well. Modern woodburning stoves get very hot and are carefully designed to have ’secondary combustion’. This means that all the smoke gets burned as well, and more or less no pollutants are released.
Speaking of fuel, I noticed on our electricity bill the other day that there is a breakdown of the sources of the electricity we use, which was interesting: 86% nuclear; 5% renewable (wind and water); 4% coal; 3% gas; 2% oil. So the renewable sources are not far off equalling the fossil fuels. Amazing huh! OK so the figures are misleading because of the enormous enthusiasm the French have for nuclear power stations, but still pretty surprising.
Anyway I have to go and stoke the fire so that when Mrs B shivers in for a cappucino in a minute she can huddle in front of the fire with it, while I tell her how hard I’ve been working. Hmmm, oak or chestnut this time, that is the question…what difficult decisions I have to make.
