Chopping Wood

I seem to be writing about nothing but wood at the moment. I have spent a large part of last weekend chopping up wood for the stoves. I was not alone in doing this – from all over the village came the sound of axes and chainsaws as my neighbours too set about getting the winter fuel stocks into usable sizes. Throughout the summer huge piles of logs rise stacked along the walls of Czech houses, ready for the winter cold.

Most Czechs, certainly ones in rural areas such as this, use wood-fired stoves as their main form of heating. At a time when oil, gas and electricity prices are rocketing, such an approach in this highly forested country offers a relatively cheap alternative. The stoves are very efficient and can put out a great deal of heat, one stove can heat a large room even in the depth of a Czech winter. The downside of this form of heating is the work required - for starters you have to be there to feed the hungry stove, which has meant for us that we have had to also install central heating for when we are in England. And then there is the endless chopping of wood, which is where my weekend's toil comes in.

All the wood is stored in the barn. I say stored, that suggests some order, which is definitely not true. The wood is the by-product of all our building works, there are old roof beams which have been chain-sawed into usable lengths which need splitting, and there are old floor timbers and window frames, all of which need sawing and chopping, as well as off-cuts of various sizes. There are even some thin slats which the former owner used to create some rather nasty wood cladding for the stairs, these require no work on my part to make brilliant tinder. All of these have been thrown into the barn by the builders, together with old sinks, left-over plasterboard, tiles, and the detritus of the previous owners' lives. It is hard to enter the building without climbing over some pile.

And so I have decided that I will this summer make my way through all of this and sort it out. That which I can cut up I will, and I will get someone else to wield a chainsaw on the bigger pieces. I am a coward when it comes to chainsaws, especially as I am on my own at the moment. My second reason for doing all this is of course the dryrot – I want to make sure that there is nothing nasty lurking in the barn. My aim is to get everything sorted into neat(ish) piles before winter arrives, when the light in the barn will be much less than it is now. All of this takes more energy than one might realise, my arm muscles are aching badly. Who needs expensive gym subscriptions when you can come and cut my wood for free?

Dryrot

This week I have been managing the work arising from an outbreak of dryrot in the kitchen. Inevitably in an old house, which had not had a great deal done to it for years, we had had some water penetration which had resulted in dryrot in some of the roof timbers. In turn their removal meant that spores from this blasted fungus were spread through out the house – I'm afraid the Czech builders were not overcareful about how they managed the process.

We decided on replacing all the roof timbers and some of the ceiling timbers upstairs as well. We also set about trying to prevent any sort of water penetration – digging a drainage ditch at the back (more of that at some other date) and protective soakaway around the other three walls. A well was installed in the cellar and the house's problems with damp did indeed seem to be solved.

However we did not allow for the inability of our plumber to tighten any pipe properly. Time and again we have had to call him back to a leaking joint. One such leak was unbeknownst to us dripping down the back of the kitchen sink unit and into the wooden unit and floor beneath. A month ago we left the house empty in a period of hot humid weather. The result – you've guessed it – a fine display of fungal bloom. Now as regular readers of this blog will know I am a great lover of mushrooms, but my love is limited to those you can collect and eat. I draw the line at dryrot.

My one consolation is that the kitchen unit, which will have to be burnt, also has a sorry history attached to it. It was created (beautifully I might add) by our errant carpenter, who delivered the unit half finished nearly two years ago and has never come back to finish it. I have been battling in my mind whether to give him up as a bad job (and either get another kitchen or get someone else to finish it) or keep waiting. My decision has now been made for me.

Sunset

When my brother-in-law stayed here with his family he was much taken with the way at dusk the houses on the far side of the village are bathed in the amber light of the setting sun. I know exactly what he means and regularly find myself standing at the front windows entranced. Yesterday the display was particularly impressive, the wonderful light of the setting sun was reflected not only on the buildings opposite but on the sky itself, which was dominated by rain clouds. Add to that a tail of a rainbow and it was quite magical. I rushed outside with my camera and managed only a few shots for you (of which this is the best) before nature's light display vanished.

Roots - A Love of Wood

My father loves wood and he shared that love with me. As a little girl I showed an interest in doing what daddy was doing. For probably my fifth or sixth birthday I asked for a toolkit for a present, rather than give me some toys my dad took me to an ironmongers and together we selected a set of real wood tools – a small saw, hammer etc. I can remember just being able to look over the counter at the selection. He encouraged me to use them too, one day when I was having trouble sawing a piece of wood, rather than do it for me or tell me what to do, he said to me that I should think how he would hold it still and left me to get on with it. When he returned I proudly showed the sawn wood, the other end of which had been kept firm by nailing it to the lid of a nice wooden box of my father's. Rather than be angry with me for ruining the box he was delighted, the inventor in him beamed at his little girl coming up with a workable solution to a problem. He still tells this story with pride forty five years on.

I never fulfilled my wood-filled promise. Going to a girls' grammar school we learnt domestic science not woodwork. Now all those years later I am planning to rectify this omission. I have decided to learn woodworking. I want to learn how saw and fix, to use the grain, to smooth and release shape and pattern. In the Czech Republic with its vast forests wood is plentiful. Here in our Czech home there is space to work – why I could even use the barn as a workshop. The house has need of such work, if my skill proves good enough. There are doors to be made and shelves, and even furniture. But I am getting ahead of myself, first I must relearn the basics and more besides. It is part of a need I feel at this time of life to go back to basics, to use my senses of touch, sight and smell. I have told my father of my plans and he is delighted. He wants to give me his tools, some handed down from his father, which he had thought he would be unable to pass on as no one was interested and in such a case how can I let him down.

Roots - The Shed

When I was very small my parents moved to the house that has been their home ever since. It is in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe,a terrace house in the street that leads past the church. It is a non-descript house, but one with a long history. All the houses in the street were built on burgage plots – long thin pieces of land with a relatively small road frontage built in the late Middle Ages to house the homes and workshops in a single plot of the artisans who serviced the community that had grown up around the large Saxon abbey. Our house had until recently been a bakery. When my father built the kitchen extension, he found medieval walls of some outbuilding.

At the end of the garden stands the “shed” - a two-storey Cotswold stone stable, where my father and later my sister had their workshops, thus the tradition of craft continued to the modern day. When we moved in, my father found owl pellets and dead snakes in jars at the bottom of the garden, the former owner had kept his owls in the shed. A large lean-to greenhouse ran the length of the shed, in front of it were vegetable beds, before they succumbed to my mother's ever encroaching flower beds. At one end of the shed instead of limestone there was an old brick wall with bricks that were crumbling away, these afforded me, when I was practicing to play backstop for the school rounders team, a surface which deflected a thrown ball in all sorts of directions. At the same end an external staircase led up to the second floor.

As is so often the case the shed was my father's domain, it was where my mother did not attempt to organise his untidyness. It was the place where he invented things – he like his father before him is an inventor and one such invention paid for the kitchen. It was also the place where he kept his wood.

My father had plans for the shed, throughout my childhood he was restoring it. It was a huge adventure – he was delighted to find cobbles in the floor, which he carefully uncovered. One day he returned from the pub with a large piece of Cotswold stone which he had been given. It looked like nothing at first until you turned it round to reveal Norman or Saxon carved stone – it was part of a pillar from the old abbey. The stone was carefully installed in the stable wall. He claimed some oak beams from the demolition bonfires at a nearby flourmill and singlehandedly installed them in the ceiling, whilst my mother watched through fingers standing at the kitchen window, unable to stop him but worried stiff that something might slip and he would be injured. By the time I was at university the shed was now so restored that I was able to have my 21^st birthday party there. But somehow that was as far as it got, somehow he never did finish it. The woodturning lathes which were waiting his retirement there have stayed unused.

Why am I saying this in a log about the Czech Republic, why now? Well this morning I caught myself delightedly unearthing granite cobblestones in the yard and I was reminded of Cotswold cobbles in the shed. Looking up I gazed at the barn. As I have said in an earlier post it was the barn that had first attracted me to buy the house and yet it remains unfinished, as something prevents my continuing in its restoration. I wonder whether this is my “shed”, whether I am acting out my father's experience and whether I will complete my dream as he did not.

Czech Weather

I am back in the Czech Republic having let some friends stay in our Czech home for what should have been a couple of weeks. Unfortunately after only three days they decided to leave because it was cold. Now the thing is that at this time of year the Czech Republic is nearly always several degrees warmer than in the UK, right now it is 30 degrees and I could do with it being somewhat colder. We Czechophiles often have problems with Brits who seem to think that the Czech Republic is somewhere up north near Russia, when instead we are actually south of the UK - only marginally - we are approximately on the same latitude as Paris.

I have learnt from bitter experience however not to overegg how the Czech Republic is normally warmer and drier than the UK. If I say this to people visiting us, then the great law of sod kicks in and there is inevitably rain when they arrive, even though the day before will have had glorious weather. Instead I say it is like the UK's weather, it can rain at times but the sunny days tend to be hotter. But clearly even that doesn't work - maybe those preconceptions are just too hard to shake off.

By the way the converse also works. I daren't say to my friends that Czech winters are usually colder and have snow, because as soon as they arrive or rather the night before there will be a sudden thaw.

The Water Spirit

The Vodnik is the Czech water spirit. Similar to the Germanic Nix the Vodnik lives in the water (usually ponds and rivers in Czech folklore) and is someone you do not want to upset. He has a malicious streak - prone to drowning people and keeping their souls in a ceramic pot. If you meet him you will see a man covered with slime and sometimes scales, wearing a coat of tatters and a hat, another give away can be his hands and feet which are sometimes webbed. He often carries a fish, the porcelain pot and a pipe - as he is known to enjoy a quick smoke and so Czech fishermen make him an offering before they fish.

Our family has a particular fondness for the Vodnik despite his unfriendly ways. Our son was given a large book of European fairystories, when he was young, and his favourite story in the book was about the Vodnik or Nix. The book was one of those lovely fairytale books from the former Czechoslovakia and published in the UK by Hamlyn. Its illustrations were by a Czech artist Jan Cerny (about whom I know nothing, not helped that his name translated is John Black and so very common) and are wonderfully Czech with a quirky humour and dark undertones. Our son has grown up into an artist and film maker and we are often struck by how his work seems to have something of that Czech illustrative style. The Vodnik in our son's book is a friendly one who helps the hero get his girl and somewhat out of character with most Czech Vodniks. Our son's imagination was taken by the Vodnik, whom he sees as a sad character looking longingly through the weed at the world beyond water.

The Czechs too have an affection for the Vodnik - you will find him in stories, in music (Dvorak wrote a symphonic poem on the subject and includes him in the opera Rusalka) or hanging up for sale in puppet shops. A few years back I found this Vodnik for sale in a confectioners in Trebon. He is made of marzipan - the Czechs make all sorts of marzipan animals and figures, which make ideal gifts. I couldn't resist him, bought him and gave him as a present for my son. My son's affection for the Vodnik did not extend to refraining from eating his gift, but not before I took this photo.