The fire's gone out!

We've been avoiding tackling the fire. It smells. It's ugly. We don't like it. So we asked Tim to come and help, because he knows no fear when it comes to building projects. We've never really believed the story that our vendor paid a lot of Euros to have the chimney swept before we moved in; well, we believed that she'd paid someone to do it, but not that it was actually done. But it turns out that it was true. We erected vast curtains to prevent the soot coating the entire house as we ripped out the metal interior of the chimney. But there was no soot. The curtain was just a modesty screen.

This preposterously revolting stuff is not soot. There's a lot of it, and it's stinky and disgusting. Tim tells us that it is 'bistre', a byproduct of burning wood that is sought after by artists. Oh yes? Well, it turns out that this is true. Look. Here is a drawing entitled 'Workers At Rest' by Jean-Honore Fragonard. I'm not yet tempted to break off a bit of it to do some drawings...

And the superfluous curtain is taken down. Now we've actually got to think about what to do with this area! We have drawings, but so far I'm not convinced. It will house the cooker. That's all I know so far. We'll wall over the back bit, just so it's there to discover in a hundred years' time (and to save us cleaning it...). I can't yet imagine that area being fresh and clean!* We're going to feed a narrow flue up into the chimney through a panel to extract cooking smells.

Footnote 1: Kevin found a plum on the driveway. We thought that Tim may have dropped it from his van when he arrived. But no! A little bit of investigation revealed that we have a plum tree! It's in between two apple trees, but there were definitely no plums last year. It makes up (to some extent) for the fruitless peach tree. They've clearly got a tag wrestling type arrangement.

Footnote 2: In my mind, there was a song that included the lyrics, sung wildly and despairingly, 'The fire's gone out!'. I thought it was on the Prayers on Fire album by The Birthday Party with Nick Cave, but I can't find it on there. Where is it from, music-lovers? No, you're right, it doesn't really matter, but... t'would be nice to know.




* The thought of the bistre and other repulsive gubbins still being there behind the nice new wall does detract a little from the principle of 'fresh and clean'. Can I live with that?