There will always be a fire burning in our house, no matter what the Scottish Government says…
Back to some audioletter action, some thoughts on solid fuel, illustrated with tunes by Laura Veirs, Talking Heads, Regina Spektor, AC/DC and many more if you listen to the Mixcloud version here:
Full playlist (and link to Spotify if you just want to the music and not my speechifying) at the end.
Bruce Springsteen — Fire
Let’s get together later
Around the radiator
We’ll spend a chilly hour
Devoid of solar power
Romantically, it’s snowing
But no wind is blowing
Turbines aren’t turning
Only our inner fires are burning
Cuddling and caressing
And perhaps undressing
Shivering and goose pimpled
It used to be so simple
Lighting a stove and candle
Now we’re not allowed to handle
Any coal or oil or wood
I’d go peat cutting if I could
I really don’t know where to turn
There’s nothing we’re allowed to burn
The Government tells us to jump
Exercise more, buy a heat pump
That the environment will be much better
If only we wear warmer sweaters
The virtue-signalling urban fools
Have no idea that solid fuel
Is how we stay more or less alive
Maybe they don’t want us to survive
When they talk of some net zero nation
They forget the rural population
A little warmth is all we seek
I pray our lums will always reek…
Hudson-Ford — Burn Baby Burn
Coal fires, paraffin stoves, electric convector heaters. Ice on the inside of the windows on cold winter mornings. That was how we lived in Pollokshaws, before we moved to Troon, Ayrshire, in 1962.
I remember the Glasgow coalmen coming weekly, the huge rattle and roar as they emptied their filthy sacks through the hatch that faced the street, down into the sinister black depths of the cellar. Being shut in there, just for a few minutes left me with a fear of the dark I didn’t lose until I was in my late teens. It was a hell of a house, part dental surgery, part too-small residence. Angry neighbours who wouldn’t return footballs.
Van Morison — Warm Love
And there was smog, fog, the great yellow Glasgow pea soupers of those industrial days, when factories and houses ran on carbon, impure and simple. When there were factories. I was going to a Hutchesons pre-school called St Ronan’s in Pollokshields, a horrorshow where they belted you from the age of five (I remember you, Miss Kemmet) for running in the wrong playground. Pupils came to school wearing filtration masks against the pollution. Everyone coughed up black slime anyway.
James Taylor — Fire and Rain
Troon had cleaner air, but we ran on coal too, initially, a 1950s house without any form of central heating, no insulation, terrible steel-framed windows that baked us in summer and froze us in almost any other season. Storage heaters, massive brown lumps of steel and brick, arrived eventually and wet washing sizzled on their overheated surfaces. But there was still a fire in the open-plan lounge, still that acrid sulphurous reek of a morning. Mum getting the fire to draw by placing a broadsheet newspaper across the grate. Inevitably it would erupt in flames and there would be screams, black cinders on the ceiling, singed fingers.
Simon Kilshaw — I Love My Log Burner
These Shetland days firelighting remains a part of my daily routine. Cutting wood, usually driftwood or scrap, bucketing peats (it’ll soon be time to head for the spring peat hill). Coaxing the Rayburn into life. It’s the cast iron centre of our old house, and always has been. We have an oil boiler but the Secret Plumber has piped the Rayburn’s back boiler into the central heating system and it takes the edge off the radiators’ cold water stasis. There are five other stoves or open fireplaces in the house, rarely used. The Rayburn (a salvaged and converted-back-to-black oil burner) is the core.
Nobody wants a return to the death-dealing urban smogs of the past. Restrictions on heating methods in the city setting are sensible. But we don’t live in a city.
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings — Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects
We are, of course, in the eyes of the Scottish Government, perpetrators of the deepest carboniferous evil. We burn oil, coal, wood and peat. The house is heavily insulated but it sits next to the sea and is in one of the stormiest places in Europe. And it’s very old, B-listed so no solar panels on the roof. There’s a wind generator in the barn we were gifted but have never erected. And so we burn carbon.
Erma Franklin — Light My Fire
Regina Spektor — Firewood
And let’s face it, who doesn’t love a real fire? Even my sustainability-ruled son, who has renovated his Glasgow house so that it is now super-insulated and running on air source heat pumps, has two lovely cast iron stoves in which he burns seasoned offcuts from whisky barrels. When the heat pumps failed after just a few weeks, the stoves provided a back-up which was essential to the welfare of two very young children.
Laura Veirs — Chimney Sweeping Man
Now, the Scottish Government has (since 1 April) essentially banned the building of new homes with solid fuel stoves or indeed, what it calls ‘Direct emission heating’. It seems there’s nothing to stop home owners installing woodburners or open fires after completion, as ‘emergency backup’ but a lot of new homes will now simply be built without chimneys. There is uncertainty about how this would apply to conversions and renovations but again, it applies to contractors rather than householders.
Paul Kelly — Firewood and Candles
There is considerable vagueness in the new law about these ‘backup systems’ but what the whole shambles definitely does illustrate is a real lack of insight into the way people in rural Scotland live. Even the likes of Kate Forbes, the thinking person’s nationalist, and Cameron McNeish, mountain man and long-term SNP supporter, have voiced their deep concern. Donna Smith, chief executive at The Scottish Crofting Federation told BBC Scotland that the policy had not been through “rural-proofing”.
“I understand why this decision makes sense, in a city, but there’s no ‘rural-proofing’ we can see at all in this policy, and that’s what we’d like to look at,” she said.
A very fair analysis of the policy can be found in the estimable Ferret website here:
They conclude that it is ‘half-true’ that the Scottish Government has banned wood burning stoves. Bad enough.
The Ruts — Babylon’s Burning
What seems obvious to me is that the whole thing is, to coin a phrase, half-baked. Take peat burning, for example. Banned industrially, and with peat bogs identified as a major carbon sink that must be protected and in some cases regenerated, burning peat in the Highlands and Islands for domestic use remains crucial to the lives of many thousands of people. Apart from the historic and sociological importance of peat cutting, it is a local, renewable (over hundreds or thousands of years, admittedly) small scale method providing heat in a way that saves ‘energy miles’. Compared to the millions of tonnes of peat excavated and discarded to build windfarms , it is a drop, literally, in the bog. I note that newly-announced Westminster Green candidate for Orkney and Shetland, Alex Armitage, is an unashamed cutter and burner of peat.
David Gray — Flame Turns Blue
AC/DC — Heatseeker
And truly there is nothing like the warmth and reek of a peat fire, unless it is the similar woody glory of burning well-seasoned windfall timber. Anyway, I’m heading off to sharpen my tushker (Shetlandic; Tairsgear in Gaelic; from the Norse). An instrument allegedly adapted from the flensing knife used to cut up whale blubber. And let’s face it, you can’t get more environmentally friendly than that…
Nic Jones — The Little Pot Stove
Talking Heads — Burning Down the House
Bruce Springsteen — Fire
Hudson-Ford — Burn Baby Burn
Van Morrison — Warm Love
James Taylor — Fire and Rain
Simon Kilshaw — I Love My Log Burner
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings — Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects
Erma Franklin — Light My Fire
Regina Spektor — Firewood
Laura Veirs — Chimney Sweeping Man
Paul Kelly — Firewood and Candles
The Ruts — Babylon’s Burning
David Gray — Flame Turns Blue
AC/DC — Heatseeker
Nic Jones — The Little Pot Stove
Randy Newman — Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield
Talking Heads — Burning Down the House
Listen to the full audioletter on Mixcloud here:
Spotify playlist:
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