Getting There...

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I will forego comment on our woeful government's current non-performance, as I don't think my blood-pressure will take much more today: suffice it to say, I'll get back to you with comment after a good sleep. Rather, I offer a simple, domestic update on our emerging-from-the-ashes[sorry] fireplace. For the first time in over forty years, this house will again have a hearth: the heart of any decent living-space, and the locus of comfort and calm in years to come, as we descend into our dotage [stop!].

The thing is that the renaissance of the ingle will put back into what is, after all, a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old quarryman's cottage, it's very centre of warmth, without which no-one would have survived in the days before electricity or gas, during the long, cold and wet wintertime. More than that, a fire of some sorts - in our case a new wood-stove - occupying a corner of one's living-space, confers a comfort almost cellular to our being: a folk-memory of our ancestors' lives deep within ourselves.

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