After one of the wettest and mildest “winters” to date we are heading, according to the forecasters, for a real cold snap. The sort of snap that will have you heading for the logs store, the loading up of the fire or woodburner, and getting the thing blazing away so that you are all warm and toasty, whilst the flames flicker and dance and create warming joyful patterns to counterbalance the miserable, negative, downbeat, destructive output of the latest episode of EastEnders! I’m not talking about a specific episode, just pick any of them!!

There is nothing quite like a real fire. Maybe it sets off some primeval instinct, where fire was an intrinsic part of human survival whereas now we live in our mollycoddled world of boilers and central heating systems and the last few generations have been virtually excluded from the joys of having a bonfire lit in the garden! Maybe that’s partly why we are so fascinated by the dancing flames because they are a rare part of our lives these days but we still understand the importance of fire?

There is nothing better than standing around a blazing bonfire, beer in hand, putting the world to rights with your mates, feeling the heat pouring off the fire and contemplating if you could get a bit more wood on there yet! And then there is the downside, you go back inside when all is done, and you realise how smoky everyone smells!! Why? Because bonfires have every bit of rubbish on them and once they are going, you can burn anything, even the wettest of wood. You are, at the time, oblivious to the smoke that is generated, although your neighbours with washing on the line 100 yards away are shaking their fists at you!

The same principle applies to burning wood in your stove or fire. Once you get it blazing away, you can get wet wood to burn, and you won’t necessarily notice it too much, but your neighbours will! Smoke pouring out of your chimney is hot, but the moment it leaves the chimney/flue, it is cooled by the outside air and that causes it to drop back down because smoke particles are 30 to 3000 times larger than air molecules and they are 1000 times more dense as well, so gravity pulls them back to earth!

So, when you burn dry logs in your stove or fire, and produce substantially less smoke or even virtually none, then not only are you getting the most amount of heat into your house, you are not impacting on your neighbours either!!

So, be nice to your neighbours!!  Get a load of kiln dried logs from www.logs.co.com !!