Jonny McCambridge column: Heating the house in winter (2) – the joys and trials of an open fire and the dirtiest chimney

There are not many things I enjoy more than gathering with my family around the hearth on Christmas Eve night in pyjamas and holding steaming mugs of hot chocolate enjoying a festive movie on the telly while the fire warms the room.

When friends or family come to visit in the winter, our glowing fire is always much admired. It is also a useful starting point for conversation.

“There’s nothing like an open fire,” I will muse wistfully.

“That’s right, there’s nothing like an open fire,” my guest will inevitably respond.

Then we will spend several seconds watching the crackling flames, studying the lick of the flames and the urgency of the smoke disappearing up the chimney as if there’s something hypnotic in the process. The seconds will drag on.

“There’s really nothing like an open fire,” I’ll say again as I search for the TV remote control down the back of the sofa.

When, as prospective buyers, my wife and I first viewed our house many years ago, it was the large fireplace which was one of the things which attracted us to the property. However, on second viewing the previous owner was forced to explain away a ghastly mess in the living room by explaining that a crow had flown down the chimney in summer and then spread soot all over the walls and furniture in a panicked effort to escape.

She assured us that if we bought the house she would repaint the walls before she left. The warning had been sounded though; open fires can be messy.

To be clear, I do not light the fire very often. I tend to wait for the really cold months. Then, in a classic case of flawed logic, I tell myself that it will save some money on oil, even though it is clearly more expensive to fuel the fire.

The corner shop sells bags of coal, blocks, sticks and peat. The fuel is displayed out the front, exposed to the rain which often renders it unusable. The boot of my car is strewn with the detritus from damp bundles of logs going back many years. It has also not done much for my wife’s bad back carrying all those heavy sacks of coal from my vehicle to the shed over the past decade.

I know that there is a certain science to successfully lighting a fire, involving flame, fuel and oxygen. There are few things more dispiriting than a fire which fails to ignite. I tend to overcompensate by filling the grate up with industrial-scale amounts of firelighters, crumpled up newspapers and sticks. It always starts off well with an impressive blaze after a few seconds and, occasionally, it will stay lit after I dump a chute of coal on top.

There is always an element of grime to be dealt with. Cleaning out the ashes of the fire is a dirty job which invariably falls to me. The soot gets everywhere, blackening my hands and clothes. When I manage eventually to get all the grey ash into a bucket and then flee towards the outside bin, a gust of wind will usually blow a large cloud of it directly into my face.

Then there is the chimney which must be cleaned annually. For years I called a local sweep (I say sweep, but he actually used a hoover) who would come to the house and always tell me that my chimney was the dirtiest he had ever seen. For a long time I felt rather shamed by this obvious failing on my part. Was it a particular character defect of mine that I was prone to having the filthiest chimney in the country? Eventually I reconciled myself to the fact that the chimney sweep was perhaps prone to hyperbole and motivated by the scheme that his complaint would lead to me summoning him back in the not too distant future to pay to have my chimney cleaned again.

The other thing he never failed to comment on was the model of my fireplace. It has the word Baxi in large letters at the foot of the chimney. You can call it a lack of intellectual curiosity on my part, but I’ve never really given much thought to it. For the chimney sweep, year after year, this was a source of seemingly endlessly interest.

Every year we had the same conversation.

“You don’t see many Baxis around nowadays," he would say.

“No, you sure don’t,” I would reply (this was not a dishonest response on my part as I’ve never seen another one, but then I probably spend a lot less time looking at fireplaces than him.)

Last year, worn down by the spiralling cost, the endless talk about Baxis and continual insults about how dirty my chimney is, I instead asked my Da if he would clean the chimney. He was uncertain at first, but I gently persisted until he relented and agreed to give it a go.

I was working in the next room on the day he arrived to do the job. I had stories to write, so I made him a cup of tea and then left him to it. It was some moments later when I heard a rushing sound coming from the front room.

I rose from my computer and walked along the hallway. I peered through the glass in the living room door. There I could see a large cloud of black dust and ash rising several feet in the air. Just about distinguishable in the middle of the cloud I could make out the shape of my Da.

“Looks like he’s got everything under control,” I mumbled to myself and went back to my work.