Winter is Coming

And the fires are going out

A while back, I wrote about how I bought a chainsaw. I needed one to saw up logs that had been left around after the council had removed some potentially dangerous branches near my house.

Previously, they would have taken away the logs and maybe sold them as fuel. Someone who knows about this sort of thing says that the council now can’t do that without storing them for several months to season first. I don’t know why. Maybe they were being blamed for chimney fires. Logs need to be seasoned. Sure. The council isn’t in the wood-selling business, and nor should it be, so the logs, I assume, were left there over the long Easter weekend with the expectation that when they returned, they would have disappeared. Otherwise, the logs would have been chipped, which seems like a very big waste of winter fuel.

Herein lies a dilemma. Winter is coming. No, I’m not referring to the Game of Thrones prequel. I’ll write about that next week. Winter is literally coming to the United Kingdom. And it’s going to be hard. Fuel bills are gong to be astronomical and we can expect riots and unrest. The reasons for that are complicated, but mostly revolve around our political and societal folly, hubris, groupthink, double-standards, virtue-signalling, incompetence and cowardice.

How about going back to basics? How about going old school and lighting a fire in the hearth (or extremely efficient, heat-retaining log burner), turning off the TV and staring into the glowing embers of a fire? Swap stories about adventures, past, present, future and fictional.

FX: Record Scratch

No, no. Stop that all that wistfulness right now. Policymakers, activists and lobby groups would say that wood burners are environmentally irresponsible. After all, what if everyone did that? (They won’t.) But what if they did? (They really won’t). The carbon emissions would be untenable (They wouldn’t be). Plus Britain would have even greater deforestation. (I believe claims that Britain was mostly forested back in the day is simply not true, but I don’t have a source for that claim or counter claim).

The Fires Are Going Out

Here I’m going to stop and hand over to Paul Kingsnorth who wrote a brilliant piece for Unherd on how the attack of log fires in your home is part of a greater onslaught on the home itself. It’s really well worth your time. And you might want to consider subscribing to his Substack, although a longer version of this article is for paying customers only. So I’m going to get out of the way and hand over to him. Please keep reading here.

And don’t forget you have until the end of August to order signed copies of The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer and The Sacred Art of Joking. If you wanted to know why, up until now, I’ve been saying that you shouldn’t buy book on Amazon, read this.