Winter is coming.
I am re-reading A Game Of Thrones, where they say that all the time. Surprisingly, they never seem to do much about it like hauling logs, or making soap to give as Christmas presents, or covering their flowerbeds with straw to keep the frost off them.
I don’t mind this because it is such a splendid book, and pretend to myself that they do these things in between declaring war on one another and letting their wolves eat dead people’s hands, and setting fire to children.
I am on the taxi rank. The air is full of smoke and firework-smell. It is the beginning of the end of the autumn, and everybody is lighting bonfires to celebrate.
It has been cool and damp today. There has been a watery sun which barely managed to rise over the rooftops enough to warm the garden, but which was bright and cheering all the same. I pegged the washing in the garden, and it dried a bit, but not much.
It is becoming much cooler, the air is pale and chill. We have had the fire lit in the evenings for a week or two, and it won’t be long before it needs to stay lit all the time.
We are not characters in A Game Of Thrones, and so we need to get ready for the winter. We have got a lot of soft wood this year, because of some pine trees we scavenged a couple of years ago, and they will be tarry to burn.
Today we needed to sweep the chimney so that it was as clean as it possibly could be before the winter crawls in and we start creating lots of tar in the stove. Once the fire has been lit for the winter it is hard to do this very often. This is obviously because of the chimney being too hot, and not wanting to let the fire go out so that it can cool down enough to poke brushes up it.
This morning Mark covered the carpet with dust sheets and dragged our chimney sweeping brushes in from the shed.
I made encouraging noises and went outside to watch for the brush popping out at the top. I still like doing this, it is a happy Mary Poppins sort of sight. When we first bought the house there were so many chimneys that we had to stick the brush up so that we could find out which one was the stove.
He took the top off the stove and emptied the wood ash into the compost and the soot on to the garden, where it is good for deterring slugs. He chipped and banged and scrubbed until the stove was clean again.
He brought wood in from the garden and stacked it until the space was full. After that we went to the ironmonger and bought some stuff that you sprinkle on the fire twice a week and it helps to keep the chimney clean.
We sprinkled it on and lit the fire, and inspected it with interest occasionally, but to be honest it did not seem to be doing very much, and the inside of the stove was every bit as black and tarry as it had been when we started. Mark thought that it probably wasn’t going to make an awful lot of difference.
We were concerned about this, because regular readers will know that it is of terrible importance not to have a chimney fire in Windermere. We have an enthusiastic and unsympathetic fire brigade, and I don’t want them in my house ever again. I didn’t want them in it last time, but they came anyway, and spent hours squirting water at the place where the fire had once been and sawing holes in the roof so that they could look at the empty chimney.
I have never forgiven them, and took some small satisfaction from the eventual discovery that they did, in the end, read about themselves on these very pages, and were cross about it.
We decided in the end that we had done everything anybody could practically do to keep the fire brigade out, like you protect against burglars by leaving a light on and remembering to close the door. After that Mark washed the taxis whilst I made our picnic for work.
We have come to work feeling very sensible and organised and prepared for the winter to come.
If they did this sort of thing in A Game Of Thrones I am sure they would not need to be nearly so grumpy with one another.
It is a pleasingly happy feeling.
