It has been dreadfully cold.
It was so cold that I started to look at our dwindling wood supplies with some alarm, and this afternoon I went outside to saw up next door’s demolished conservatory with Mark’s scary Health And Safety saw.
I do not like this at all. It is a tool designed to lull the operator into a false sense of security. It has so many safety precautions that you start to feel perfectly at ease whilst you are using it, and then the next minute you might be just the tiniest bit careless, and your typing days are over for ever.
You cannot even stand at a respectful distance and shove the wood through with a stick, the way I did with the old one. You have got to be right beside it, holding the On switch down the whole time.
It is lethally terrifying and dangerous.
It needed doing anyway, because a demolished conservatory takes up a very great deal of room in a back yard. There were planks and sticks propped up all over the place, and tiresomely I had to move them all to get to the saw bench, and then had to move them all again to get into the shed to get the saw. This sounds like mismanagement but it wasn’t. There was no other way that it could be achieved, and I considered it for some time, the way you do with the puzzles about the wolf and the goat and the cabbage and the rowing boat.
I trapped my fingers several times in the process, with the consequence that they were bleeding even before I had got the saw out.
This hardly mattered, because it was so cold that they were numb.
I had been out there for about ten minutes when the Weather Gods noticed me, and hurled about half a tonne of hailstones at me. Hailstones are not nice. They go down the back of your neck and stay for ages until they have melted, slowly.
I gave up at that point, and went indoors to hunt for my thermal-lined leather gloves. I found one in the shoe rack and the other one in the taxi. Both of them were covered in sheep poo.
I did not put them on straight away, tempting as it was. I stood next to the fire and tried to get my hands warm.
They hurt a lot, in the way that very cold things do when they are trying to come back to life. My fingers had gone white, and looked interestingly the way that dead people’s fingers do, only dirtier, because undertakers helpfully clean your fingernails for you when you are really dead.
I waggled them about, experimentally, until the life reluctantly trickled back in to them, and then I pulled on the thermal gloves and trudged outside to renew our central heating.
Fortunately, demolished conservatories make excellent firewood. They are made of ancient dry hardwood, and it burns beautifully hot. Of course there are nails and screws in it all over the place, which means that you have got to be extra-careful with the saw, but apart from that they do not matter. We have got some monstrous magnets which once did duty holding the big signs on to the roof of taxis, and we always keep one next to the fire for cleaning out the grate. I like doing this. It is very satisfying indeed when fistfuls of nails fly out of the grate and clunk against the magnet, like being Harry Potter with a Summoning Charm.
I filled the fire up and replenished the log pile, and I had sawn almost all of it up when Mark turned up.
This was unexpected, because he was supposed to be at work, but he had been taking things to the tip and had got a boot full of more firewood, which he unloaded, helpfully, into the yard before buzzing off back to work.
I grumbled, because that is what you do, but I was very pleased.
We have got a demolished conservatory and some skirting boards and some old shelves. We will be warm even if the Weather Gods turn the hailstone-taps on and then go out and forget.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy and Pepper, who were also feeling the cold.
