‘Tis the season

It’s the season of evening fires, big skies, woolly socks, sleeping cats and warming food.

Winter is upon us, and although it’s not that cold yet, the trees are bare and the nights are stretching, dark and long.

It is dark now by 4.30pm and we make sure that the log basket is filled before then and that the woodburner is lit.

It’s a ritual that I love, turning the lights on, lighting candles in the living area and generally making things cosy. The crackling of the logs and the faint scent of woodsmoke are an essential part of winter.

The cats are usually in and sleeping if the weather is wet or windy, and it’s often both.

We bought a couple of extra chairs this week so that we can accommodate eight around the dining table more comfortably at Christmas. We have family staying plus friends and it’ll save us having to wheel office chairs in.

My love affair with old Ercol pieces continues. These are cowhorn chairs, as they’re called, solidly made of English elm, dating back to the 1950s. Elm is a lovely wood. Ercol are still making these today, but they’re no longer made of elm as there’s none left after Dutch Elm Disease ravaged the English forests over the last fifty years.

They join the mismatched crew of chairs from our previous lives around my old French oak dining table, made from trees felled in a French forest after the big storms of 1995.

I like that our furniture has had lives. It may be a bit shabby but it suits us.

We also unpacked my old sewing machine at last, so I’ve had a bit of a rearrange in my study to set it up and make a little space for sewing and another for reading and watching the world go by.

I can’t wait to get my easels in there and a work table so that I can also paint.

And get some art up onto the walls. It’s still all in the shed with the remaining boxes awaiting the walls to be finished. The house looks empty without art.

Soon, soon.