The Woodman

My life history as a woodman and wood burning stove user is being put to the test...

Let’s not beat about the bush: I started my working life as a woodman and so for years, I have been a user of an open wood fire or an ordinary wood-burning stove. In my daily work these days I have left my life as a woodman way behind me. Even my second career as a long distance lorry driver has gone. These days I am mainly at my desk in front of a computer, so I actually enjoy getting my chainsaw and my splitter out, felling trees, splitting logs and all the outdoor work involved in heating my home the way I love to and always have done. With a wood fire and stove.

Sometimes I just need to go outside and empty my head of the rubbish that my modern life fills it with, for an hour or two, and leave behind me a heap of enough logs to last a month or two, with a clear head and my history revisited in a way that only my connection with trees, wood and fire can give me. Now, I am not a tree hugger, although I can see what it gives them, but it makes me feel a hell of a lot better.

And then there is the smell of wood! Softwood or hardwood, the resinous and aromatic pines, firs and spruces or the cleaner smelling and somehow timeless hardwoods of a historic old England. Both fresh-cut and dry. I’m equally at home with any of it and pride myself on understanding the burning qualities of any fire. And finally: even on a cold, dark, winters night, with rain or snow blowing in horizontal sheets of water across the garden, that short walk across the yard to refill the log basket never hurt anyone. That is how it has been for years it has been a part of what makes me, me, for longer than I can remember.

But now my very relationship with nature and my very history as a wood-burning stove user is being tested... The very latest stoves and fireplaces sold at Wiltshire Ranges and Stoves offer some that use gas. I have now got to know them and it is my job to tell the world just how wonderfully easy they are to use and how easy it was to turn my back on my history.

This is where I have been shocked, that it would be so easy to turn my back on something that I thought had defined me for so long! I couldn’t imagine being able to program a fire so the kitchen and living room are already warm when you come down in the morning! Now comes the crazy bit, imagine – lighting a fire by just tapping the screen of your smartphone. And using that same device, which is always by my side or in my pocket, to turn up and down the flames and heat. I never thought having a stove could be so easy?! I won't use the word lazy, although I have been accused of such by the ready and easy way I have fallen in love with this new way of living; warm, comfortable and with even more reason to keep my smartphone with me at all times. The words convenient and very easy, describe perfectly what I have experienced with the new gas stoves.

They fit in with my schedules as a busy designer and writer, where my wife keeps a relentless supply  of other things to see to, which strangely have appeared on my daily and weekly things to do list but were nowhere to be seen before we went gas. So for those looking for easy heat, those living on the 4th floor and perhaps those who are a little older, I am kinda warming to this monster in my grate.

I am not there quite yet. But who knows?