Fire and dust

Open fires are beautiful but are they worth it? All that wood carrying, and wood's passengers, who wake up to find themselves in my kitchen having gone to sleep in an oak tree 2 kilometres away. Sometimes they have wings, which are damply unfurled, dried out, then flying and zooming practice takes place - loud, scary and at best distracting. I know as I usher them out of the windows that they're going to die but I don't care. Some of them are big and bitey. Others crawl off quietly and I only guess they are there because of the cat's fascinated attention fixed on a crack in the stone, with an occasional claw extended to try for getting something to make a home run.

Olive wood tends to be a winter retreat for whole armies of ants, who emerge in good order from the end not in the flames but then pour like gaderene swine off the other end and onto the hot metal. Yuk.

Smoke carries tiny particles of ash which arrange themselves in the graceful patterns of cobwebs that would otherwise be invisible (at least till I get round to them).

And everywhere there is dust; remove it and the fires will have it back in next to no time. So I've left it. Till today. Today the hearth in the big kitchen has been swept and mopped, and its copper and brass bits polished; an artistic arrangement of brushed-down, clear of passengers, hibernating or otherwise, wood has been placed between the fire irons.

If anybody puts a match to it, there will be trouble.