Our fire is something of an obsession. We live in an old house that is made of granite and has no nice cavities, insulated or otherwise, to keep out the cold. We also don’t have any gas in our village except of the bottled variety so we have to heat our freezing cold house that’s on the top of an exposed moor, with hyper-expensive oil. The UK government has a rule of thumb that you are in fuel poverty if you spend more than 10% of your income on fuel. I worked out, in a dull moment, or more precisely a moment when I was incandescent with rage because our electricity supplier has put up our direct debit by nearly 50% again, that we spend more than 20% of our income on fuel. It's madness when you consider that we rarely even see a temperature of 16 deg C in our lounge.

So, we spend a lot of time, thought and effort trying to keep warm while spending as little as possible on heating. It’s not being helped this year by the fact that it’s barely been above freezing since mid-March and today it was trying hard to snow again.

If I’m here on my own, it’s not uncommon for me to be sitting at my desk wrapped in a duvet and wearing rather more layers that would be considered “normal”. When we are both here, we sometimes allow ourselves the luxury of setting the fire mid-afternoon rather than waiting for the usually obligatory 7pm.

In the last couple of days I have spent several hours hand-sawing logs into lengths short enough to fit into the fire because I am too terrified to try to use the chain saw. I’ve managed to make quite a decent stash of wood that’ll certainly keep us going now until we stop burning a fire for a few months in the summer. In 2011 I worked as a gardener throughout the summer and when I was cutting back shrubs etc that people didn’t want, I’d bring home the wood, lob it into the back garden and now it’s dry I can cut it for firewood. It was a fantastic free resource that would otherwise have gone into landfill. All it has taken is a bit of effort on our behalf to miniaturise it for the fireplace.

Our hotties are still doing a grand job and look like they’ll see out April as we needed them to do to make them cost effective compared to buying ordinary wood logs from a log supplier BUT we have found that they are almost impossible to get going in a cold hearth. We have even, on one or two occasions, set them alight with a blow torch to get them going. A normally set fire with paper and kindling just doesn’t get hot enough to get them going so we now start the fire in the traditional way, with a couple of ordinary logs then add the hotties later.

Every now and then I spot a log lying around that’s too big for the fireplace but too small to warrant our attention to chain saw it down. This big log has, quite literally, been lying next to my compost bins since we moved to the house seven years ago. It’s quite rotten but is so heavy that I thought it’d be worth a try to burn it and I’ve discovered that if you take the safety guard out of the fireplace, you can get logs in that are significantly bigger than when it’s in place. This might still be burning tomorrow if we are lucky. It’s basically “rubbish” that was left by our predecessor but it’ll provide us with a free evening’s heat and because this beasty has a back-boiler in it too, we get the sitting room warm, a tank full of hot water and a warm bathroom because the hot tank has a heat sink radiator to stop it from boiling.