Clare Teal: Challenge of getting to grips with a wood burning stove

The second half of last year proved so busy work-wise that we didn’t get chance to see any friends and family for a social so did our best to fit as many in over the festive period and this practice will continue from now till we start touring again in February when hopefully we’ll have caught up with everyone. Just before Christmas we had a wood burning stove fitted in the back room. Once we realised that the damp wood we’d bought from the garage was the reason we weren’t basking in T-shirts toasting marshmallows, Muddy figured we needed a better system. So we had a load of seasoned logs delivered.

I must confess I had no appreciation of just how many logs you can fit in a trailer till they were dumped on the drive. With Alistair, the log bearer’s parting words ringing in our ears: “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they stack their logs”, we set to work Muddy, myself, our hero and my 75-year-old mum Mary. It was cold and raining and the tarpaulin we’d bought to cover the wood was about 17 times bigger than it needed to be and, powered by a feisty wind, mum impressively nearly took off a couple of times. I think anyone looking at what I’ll loosely term our wood store, would be forgiven for thinking chimps had been deployed… but then I feel that’s unfair to chimps.

As a first attempt I feel it’s more than acceptable – or to put it another way, none of us feel inclined to have another go.

Log burners bring out the boy Scout/girl Guide in all of us and it’s been fascinating to observe how various guests have gravitated towards the burner volunteering their fire-building skills most willingly. As a stove novice, I thought it pertinent to purchase a magnetic thermometer to ensure we were operating at an optimal temperature and Don, husband of Megan (opener of brown envelopes), thought it his duty to see just how hot our wood burner could get. Polite pleas of “My goodness it’s hot in here” quickly escalated to “PUT THE DAMNED LOG DOWN, DON!”

With that, and puppy Alan, who needs a telly?