In Suffolk it’s always about 40 years ago, but for the past two days it’s been a lot more than that. There was a big storm. It woke me up before the alarm at ten to seven yesterday morning. It’s now seven pm the next day. The electricity has just come back on.
I live in the old brewhouse of a Georgian country house. Everything here is electric. There are no fireplaces in a brewhouse. Luckily, one of my things has been fire. I like making fires. I always have. Which also means I have lots of things to set light to things. No, I don’t know why either officer, but it’s been pretty useful, frankly.
For hot drinks (vital for boosting morale among the troops, skipper) I had my trust Kelly Kettle handy, which is essentially a double-skinned metal chimney. You put the water in the cavity aroujnd the chimney and light a fire at the bottom. It takes one Financial Times special report on engineering investment opportunities in Botswana to boil a litre of water. The only issue was that I had to do this outside, having no fireplace.
Heating food was another matter. I have used the firebox on the Kelly Kettle as a stove base, last April in Dorset and idyllic though it was, not something I wanted to repeat kneeling on gravel. I had two other options though, a hexamine stove and an antique Primus. If you have one of these, do yourself a favour and put it straight on Ebay so that someone else can stick a towel under the tap before their kitchen catches fire from the spray of burning biofuel. To be fair, it worked ok-ish on paraffin but I switched to something more environmentally-friendly. Which was a good idea until I became the endangered species. Junk it.
The hexy stove was at nominally safer. Issued by the gazillion to the German army under the name of the Esbit stove and to the British army as hexamine stoves, these burn little white tablets that burn smokelessly to not give away your position to the enemy for exactly seven minutes, enough time to just about boil a pint of water. Two tablets one after the other are enough to re-heat a family-sized amount of vegetable stew to boiling. It’s probably a very good idea not to touch the metal stove for a bit, I found.
So much for cooking and drinking. Lighting was another issue. I have a Tilly lamp but after the first pressurised paraffin incident I wanted to avoid another, quite urgently. Luckily I have two Bi-Alladin paraffin lamps. These would have been better if I had mantles for them but they cost about £20 each, so I don’t. Without them they burn dimly unless you turn the wick up high, in which case they guzzle fuel. The good corollary of this is they produce a lot of heat, which was frankly welcome.
Candles. Tea lights. A wind-up torch. One of those stupid headlamps (no, what are they actually FOR? Really?) Best of all, for Day One anyway, was my old paraffin lantern, taken off the boat for the winter.
Day Two wasn’t so good. I think maybe the wick had burned down and I made a hash of taking it apart to adjust it. More accurately, taking it apart, like the motorbikes I used to have, that was pretty easy; it was the getting it all back together so that it actually works that proved problematic.
All in all it was a good learning experience. It taught me that just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s any good for you. Admittedly, chosing slightly more partners on that basis in the past would have been a better idea but it’s not a perfect world. It taught me that simple solutions are the best solutions. And that I need to sort out off-grid electricity, at least for basics like lighting, as soon as I can.
Apart from candles (light, cheap, warming, nice ambience), people stopped using old things because they found better things. Not necessarily high-tech things. Just better thought out. Now all I need to do is shake the hexamine headache and I’ll be fine. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And a lot of the things they did were dim. Literally.
