HEARTH AND HOME

My mother gives a wonderful description of the day that the Sweep used to call when she was a young school girl. She would arrive home from school and be greeted by her mother swathed from top to toe in headscarves and overalls and the house would be completely encased in dustsheets. The day the Sweep came signified total chaos in what was otherwise an impeccable household routine.

Our attempts to get the log burner going in very cold weather had been somewhat fruitless and we set about emptying out all the unburnt offerings from the day before and having a good sweep up around the fireplace. K found his rubber headed camping mallet and starting tapping the chimney all the way up and particularly around the two elbows just above the stove.

If anyone has read the tale of Lord Peter Wimsey’s Busman’s Honeymoon, they will remember what happened when someone decided to clear a blocked flue at Tallboys by firing a shotgun up the chimney and how he had wisely backed out of the room foreseeing what was going to happen next. With this picture in my mind, and my mother’s chimney sweep tale, I moved as much as I could as far out of range of the chimney as possible and prepared for the worst.

Eventually, persistent hammering forced the joints in the stove pipe apart and we had several large polythene bags poised with their necks wide open to catch whatever emerged. Fortunately it was mostly damp soot and clinker which we were able to scoop out of the bend in the pipe and sweep up without too much hassle. This seemed much too easy, but we pressed all the metal joints back together again and swept the floor. This was as much as we could do before we waited for Anna to arrive as we would be driving her to the airport for her afternoon flight to Athens

The drive the airport on the main E75 road snaked along for 40 miles or so between the mountains and the sea. It was good to see the normal dark aqua colour of the sea instead of the stormy waves from a few days back. The air was cold but the sun shone and it was good to see all the olive groves and sheep grazing on the lower slopes of the mountain chain which runs from East to West of Crete. Anna treated to us to a late lunch at a Café Grill she knows quite close to the airport and the waiter brought plates of food containing enough on each to feed a family of five. Kimon and I promptly invented our dog called “Bonzo” and requested a “packetto” for our dog to put in all the remaining chicken which we could not manage. What with this and the contents of Anna’s fridge we will not need to foodshop for a week.

We returned to the house to re-engage with the stove project. In case of leaks in the pipework, we had heard that locals used bread dough to plug any gaps – so I set about making a loaf of bread from ingredients I had in the house from our previous holiday trip. Without scales or a recipe book I managed to make a better loaf of bread than usual and had kept back a small lump of dough on hand for an emergency seal.

After a little hesitation, we gingerly set the fire again and had another go. We checked all the joints in the chimney and went outside to see if smoke was coming out of the chimney pot. I can’t begin to tell you how welcome it was to see such a good blaze and a steady plume of smoke from the tee shaped chimney stack outside. We had a ridiculously great sense of achievement and our long delayed pipe and slippers evening had arrived at last with the heavenly smell of freshly baked bread in the house in the background. Our pyjamas and slippers were warming gently, we had a warm drink to hand and we watched the glowing embers in the back of the stove with songs from the Eagles playing gently in the background.

Yes, it was a good day.