A cheery wood fire burns in the grate. Outside, it’s cold enough to freeze the pendulum off a grandfather clock. The fire is interesting. It’s a stove made out of pig-iron, with a little window in the door so that you can see the living flame. It acts just like the firebox of a steam locomotive, that is to say, the draught almost sucks the fuel up the chimney before it has a chance to burn, leaving the poor sweating fireman to keep on shovelling until he almost falls over from exhaustion. In my case, this means walking out into the back yard in the freezing cold, and filling a wicker basket with logs from a wood store about thirteen times of an evening. When I open the hinged door, the heat is so intense that it almost singes my caterpillar eyebrows. Some of the wood is damp, so the fire crackles and spits like an angry cat. I’m terrified I set the house on fire and there’s a get-out clause for the insurers for fires aren’t supposed to expectorate. I wear a pair of chrome leather gloves because the door knob is too hot to touch, but they are so stiff in the fingers that they won’t turn the knob anyway, so I’m reduced to using a damp tea-towel wrapped around my hand. The stove is not in my home Scotland, where such an artifact would be impossible as I have neither fireplace nor chimney, it’s in my sister’s house in Wallsend, where I’m now visiting for three days each week, to help my mother with the shopping, now that I am only semi-employed.
I stay here alone – the house is completely empty, and a fairly miserable existence it is too. There’s no TV licence for this dwelling, so I can’t watch the telly, so I am reduced to desperate measures, such as tending a fire, to keep myself amused. I have no internet access, so I can’t find out from Facebook what someone had for their breakfast this morning. For that, I have to journey a long mile to Wallsend Library, where you get a free half an hour then you have to pay a pound an hour after that. Half an hour just about takes care of my spam emails.
I have played chess on my laptop. I play at level one, which means anyone of five years old can beat the computer. Someone had better call up a five-year-old because I almost always make a lunatic move which ends up with me losing my queen and, unlike the board game where you can always retract the move without anyone noticing, the computer won’t let you do that, so I invariably lose.
I also played Scrabble. I accidentally allowed the computer to play against me. It scored 540 points to my 237. When the computer tacked ‘titious’ onto the end of ‘fact,’ I thought it was programmed to cheat. When I checked the dictionary later, I found that the word ‘factitious’ did indeed exist, though it hadn’t been used for the best part of three centuries. It was an archaic word that apparently appeared more than once in ‘An Innkeeper’s Diary’ by John Fothergill. I only played Scrabble the once.
Last Friday, I was so bored, I went into the loft, and brought down all of the Xmas decorations that were left over that no-one wanted, including a two-foot-six-inch high apology for a tree. I set up the living-room with them, which made me feel a little more cheerful, even though there will be no-one else but me here to view them until after 12 January. So I sit in front of a blazing fire, with some sorry-looking decorations including what feels suspiciously like a rubber poinsettia, with ‘The Broons at War’ to read and Chris Barber’s unruly jazz band compact discs to listen to, with the certainty that there will be no visitors and I will see no-one until tomorrow. Still, it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, so I mustn’t grumble. My grumbling will start in earnest on Christmas morning.
I stay here alone – the house is completely empty, and a fairly miserable existence it is too. There’s no TV licence for this dwelling, so I can’t watch the telly, so I am reduced to desperate measures, such as tending a fire, to keep myself amused. I have no internet access, so I can’t find out from Facebook what someone had for their breakfast this morning. For that, I have to journey a long mile to Wallsend Library, where you get a free half an hour then you have to pay a pound an hour after that. Half an hour just about takes care of my spam emails.
I have played chess on my laptop. I play at level one, which means anyone of five years old can beat the computer. Someone had better call up a five-year-old because I almost always make a lunatic move which ends up with me losing my queen and, unlike the board game where you can always retract the move without anyone noticing, the computer won’t let you do that, so I invariably lose.
I also played Scrabble. I accidentally allowed the computer to play against me. It scored 540 points to my 237. When the computer tacked ‘titious’ onto the end of ‘fact,’ I thought it was programmed to cheat. When I checked the dictionary later, I found that the word ‘factitious’ did indeed exist, though it hadn’t been used for the best part of three centuries. It was an archaic word that apparently appeared more than once in ‘An Innkeeper’s Diary’ by John Fothergill. I only played Scrabble the once.
Last Friday, I was so bored, I went into the loft, and brought down all of the Xmas decorations that were left over that no-one wanted, including a two-foot-six-inch high apology for a tree. I set up the living-room with them, which made me feel a little more cheerful, even though there will be no-one else but me here to view them until after 12 January. So I sit in front of a blazing fire, with some sorry-looking decorations including what feels suspiciously like a rubber poinsettia, with ‘The Broons at War’ to read and Chris Barber’s unruly jazz band compact discs to listen to, with the certainty that there will be no visitors and I will see no-one until tomorrow. Still, it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, so I mustn’t grumble. My grumbling will start in earnest on Christmas morning.
