You need to sign in or subscribe to read more articles

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our complete archive

Subscribe

‘I’ll maybe put a match to the fire,’ my father would say. The tentative phrasing belied one of the great certainties of my childhood. The fire was lit most evenings, except in high summer, but in Aberdeen you were sometimes glad of it then too. Our 1960s decorative brick fireplace was the heart of the household. It was there for warmth, but it had a significance beyond the heat it provided. It seemed to ease something, or enable something – a wordless sharing of domestic space. In the absence of a television (my Presbyterian parents disapproved of it), the fire supplied diversion. It was at the centre of our family circle every day when my father read the King James Bible and prayed. This might sound like the 1670s, not the 1970s, but it was on a footstool at the hearth that I learned to recite the Shorter Catechism. I knew the sight and sound of burning coal so intimately – the way it cracked and split, the way a flame found its way to the microjets of methane and oozing tar – that it was easy to visualise hell as a landscape of blistering rock.

At the age of four, I learned how to crumple a few sheets of the Press and Journal into the grate, to roll up others into tight overhand knots that would provide more lasting tinder, then to place kindling in a lattice that would support smaller lumps of coal. An unspoken rule dictated that one match from the Scottish Bluebell box on the mantel was sufficient. A second match was a failure. You could quickly get a good blaze if the draught was open from below and the living-room door was firmly closed, but the balance of air pressure in our suburban house could be tricky. We learned not to open the living-room door when the fire had just been lit because to close it again might send a cloud of smoke billowing into the room, an outcome even worse than a second match.

I still put this early firecraft training to work on many if not most evenings between October and March. We live inside the City of Edinburgh Smoke Control Area, which means that open fires are banned, as is house coal, but we are allowed to burn wood as long as it has less than 20 per cent moisture content and the combustion takes place in an authorised appliance – in our case, a Morsø Squirrel, twenty years old and a little rusty, but a more efficient and a less polluting technology than anything my ancestors used. I love our wood stove, not just the comfort of it but the work it demands: cleaning the glass with spit and ashes, the fire-setting and the fire-lighting, the slow coming to life, the tinkering with doors and vents in the early stages of the burn cycle. I like to invert the bottom-up method I was taught (paper, kindling, then coal or logs on top) by placing the logs at the bottom, then letting the embers sink down. My parents wouldn’t have approved, but since they’re dead I don’t have to worry about that, or about how many matches I use. In fact I’ve moved beyond matches: I strike sparks from a ferrocerium rod onto tumble dryer lint. I’m a twisted fire-starter.

This winter, the prohibitive cost of gas means the stove might get a bit more use. Other households are clearly thinking along similar lines. Wood stove sales in the UK have risen 40 per cent; 35,000 units were sold between April and June. The hardware chain Toolstation recently reported a 30 per cent rise in chainsaw sales, suggesting that people are thinking about using salvaged wood to burn at home. With firewood prices rising steeply across the UK and Europe, the World Economic Forum is even talking about making woodstores an economic indicator, a sign of adaptation to energy independence from Russia. The Putin-supporting leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, was filmed chopping logs, trolling his European counterparts by saying that in the absence of Russian gas, EU citizens couldn’t be too choosy about whether fir or birch made better firewood.

Please sign in or subscribe to read the full article.

Sign in

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Letters

Vol. 45 No. 3 · 2 February 2023

Fraser MacDonald draws attention to the negative health effects of domestic wood burning (LRB, 5 January). He is right to say that PM 2.5 emissions in the UKPM 2.5 refers to the mass per cubic metre of air of particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres – have been ‘falling steadily for decades’, and the same goes for its larger cousin PM 10, visible as black smoke. This doesn’t, however, necessarily equate to a reduction in particle pollution. When particles are measured at the nanoscale, and by total numbers of particles rather than mass, the story is rather different. Modern cars and expensive stoves are indeed very efficient, and produce virtually no black smoke. They do, however, produce invisible nanoparticles by the trillion.

MacDonald mentions reassuring readings from his home PM 2.5 monitor. Such domestic laser-based monitors are incapable of registering particles with a diameter less than 300 nanometres (the 2.5 micrometre upper limit of PM 2.5 equates to 2500 nanometres), yet it’s these nanoparticles that enter our bloodstream and clog our arteries. In a study from 2016, researchers at the University of Edinburgh asked participants to breathe in particles of (inert) gold. They found that only particles below 30 nm passed through the lung walls and entered the bloodstream, subsequently piling up around fatty blockages in arteries (the precursor of strokes). MacDonald mentions that pollution particles ‘are thought to bear some responsibility for strokes’; in fact the Global Burden of Disease study estimates that air pollution accounts for 21 per cent of all deaths from stroke and 24 per cent of all deaths from ischaemic heart disease.

Studies have shown that 90 per cent of all particles beside busy roads have a diameter below 100 nm, too small to register in PM 2.5 readings. In essence, lighting a stove at home – no matter how efficient – causes much the same situation in your living room. There is, no doubt, a primal pull towards fire; if a pub has a fire lit I gravitate towards it. But we must – as with passive smoking – collectively understand and accept the risks, or collectively reject them. Those with little choice should be allowed to heat themselves by whichever means are available. But the recent 40 per cent rise in wood-burning stove sales has very little to do with fuel poverty, and more to do with middle-class taste.

Tim Smedley
Banbury, Oxfordshire

Vol. 45 No. 8 · 13 April 2023

I enjoy a blazing hearth as much as anyone, so I read Fraser MacDonald’s piece on domestic fires with interest (LRB, 5 January). My father ran a bowling alley in Islip, on Long Island, from 1956 onwards, and we always had a supply of bowling pins, damaged beyond repair, to supplement the usual kindling and logs in our fireplace. A pin would take a few seconds to catch fire, but when it did, it put me in mind of napalm. An impressive sound, too. This was of course the extremely flammable coating. After a minute or so, the flame attenuated and the hardwood maple burned well and long, without smoke. I hate to think, though, of the gases and particulates produced in that open hearth, guarded only by a metal screen.

These were also the days when the kids of the neighbourhood danced, like fauns and satyrs, in the cloud of DDT sprayed from a truck that made the rounds to kill mosquitoes in summertime. (There was usually a beautiful late afternoon light that illuminated the cloud, inspiring us further.) Not a single grown-up appeared at the door to yell, ‘Are you kids out of your minds? Get in here! That stuff is poison!’

Allen Schill
Turin, Italy

send letters to

The Editor
London Review of Books
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address and a telephone number

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences