French Life-expat France

Winter is some way off yet, we hope, but there are a few things to be done in advance. The main job to do before it gets cold is to make sure we have a big stock of wood to burn, since it’s the cheapest most environmentally way to heat a house, and also it looks groovy to have a fire burning.

Usually I leave it until November to sort out the wood, typically when it is already raining and blowing a gale, but last week we had a cold day, and when Mrs B asked for the fire to be lit I started to panic and thought I’d make a start on the woodpile.

We don’t have open fires - they are inefficient and hard work. Instead, like almost everyone we know around here, we have woodburning stoves (one in each property). Efficient and beautiful, they extract about 90% of the maximum possible heat from the burning wood, and get hot enough to burn the smoke as well - so there is very little pollution.

These woodstoves can also burn without intervention for about 12 hours, unlike a real fire which you have to poke and prod every 20 minutes to be sure you are sending plenty of heat straight up the chimney. But woodstoves do get through a lot of wood.

This year we haven’t bought any wood for burning, but plan to use up the wood we already have, along with a few trees we have lying around. So this means I need to come up with about five cubic metres of timber, which is a lot. So I’ve been busy cutting and chopping.

This is a job that every single person in south-west France is familiar with, and not a single person in south-east England, where we used to live. If you are planning to move to rural France I recommend you start practicing your wood-chopping. I doubt that a round of golf is adequate preparation.

Someone came around to show me how to sharpen my chainsaw properly, so that is now whooshing through great logs like the proverbial knife through butter, but that still leaves the problem of splitting the logs - since a 50cm lump of tree trunk is too big to go directly in the woodstove, it needs to be split lengthways.

This involves quite a lot of hard work - work which tapping on my keyboard all day has hardly prepared me for - and is mostly done with a tool that is a type of cross between an axe and a sledgehammer - heavy, and pointed but not sharp. It also involves a lot of dangerous near-misses, as I am rather un-coordinated and often miss the log altogether and hit my foot instead.

The neighbours are too polite to actually stand there laughing at my efforts, so they presumably amuse each other with tales of my feebleness later on in the bar, while I am lying comatose in bed and Mrs B is calling me a big baby and refusing to rub soothing ointments onto my aching muscles.