Saw fingers

I have been busy.

I have been organising the central heating.

I was looking at some government grant pages on the mighty Internet the other night, and discovered, to my amusement, that our stove is actually something called a Biomass Boiler.

I liked the sound of this, it seems better and more environmentally virtuous, somehow, than just plain ‘stove’.

It is so virtuous that we could have a grant to get one if we didn’t already have one. We could even get a grant for putting a divorce solar panel on our wall, because it is not called a divorce solar panel at all. It is called a bio thermal solar water heater.

We can’t get any grants because we don’t actually need a biomass boiler and a bio thermal solar water heater. This is because we already have a perfectly functional stove and divorce solar panel which do exactly the same job for half of the price, even with the grant.

We don’t want grants anyway. If the Government wanted to do something useful they could come round and help saw up some firewood.

This is what I have been doing today.

I chucked the dogs in the taxi and went to the farm. Mark is working too many hours to do things like this very much any more. Driving a taxi does not earn very much now, and so we have got to do it quite a lot to make enough money to be hedonistic.

I have not been to the farm for ages. I do not like going with Mark because he likes to stay all day and do major projects. I do not really mind staying all day but there is nowhere for me to have a wee. I am too old not to mind about this.

There is a stack of firewood at the farm which is fairly dry and does not need cutting up, so I filled the boot of the car. This took some time.

The thing is that the Weather Gods have form when it comes to this sort of activity. As you know, they don’t tend to miss such a golden opportunity for humour, and they made the very most of it today.

The sun was shining when I arrived, but in less than ten minutes it was snowing.

Not real snow, not really. It was enormous fat drops of sleety wet snow, but it was not nice down the back of my neck.

It snowed and lashed with rain alternately, until Roger Poopy and I gave up and scurried for cover under the boot of the car. It stopped then, and the sun beamed affectionately down on us.

We carried on then, and after a minute or two the performance was repeated.

I was drenched quite quickly.

In the end we gave up and chugged home.

There was a small stack of firewood still left in the yard at home.

I moved this into the house, because it was already dry. You do not want your driest firewood at the bottom of the pile and the newest, dampest stuff on the top.

I did not unload the car straight away.

The builders from across the road have been having a tidy up and have left us piles and piles of scrap timber. This is very useful indeed, free heating is a very fine thing, but it does need to be sawn up.

Usually Mark does this but I am currently a Rural Broadband Widow.

He saws it up with an invented sawbench of his own. This is a circular handsaw, fastened upside down to a piece of wood, so that the blade sticks out at the top.The whole thing then sits across the top of the open dustbin and you push bits of wood against the blade.

It is such a terrifying contraption that I do not even like to go into the yard whilst he is using it.

Today I thought that I would give it a go. 

It does not even have an off switch. It sets off when you plug it in and stops when you pull the plug out.

I dragged next door’s dustbin into the yard and balanced the saw on the top.

It took me a while to work out which way up it went.

The bit without any safety guards was the bit on the top, obviously.

I plugged it in and tried it. You push the wood against the terrifyingly noisy spinning blade, using a stick instead of your hands as much as you can, and the blade cuts it in half.

You get another bit of wood and do the same again.

Readers, I am now a self-trained circular saw operator.

Basically the whole thing can be summed up in a few short words.

They are: keep your fingers out of the way.

The rest of any Health and Safety advice is mere detail after that.

Mark has forgotten this useful suggestion a couple of times, and has some dramatic scars to remind him of his neglect.

The Weather Gods watched with interest and sent a violent and mildly painful burst of hailstones my way, after which it rained so hard that I had to cover the plug bit of the saw with a plastic bag, when the sun came out. 

I cut up lots of the wood, taking care to keep my fingers out of the way. I do not think there are any of them that I could easily manage without.

I was not at all sorry when I had finished.

I unloaded the car and made a large, if untidy, stack of firewood. I covered it all with a plastic sheet, and left it to steam gently in the afternoon sunshine.

Then I went to work.

Obviously I was late. There are only so many hours in the day.