I was lolling by my log fire in Shepherd’s Bush, enjoying the faint smell of wood smoke and the crackle of the flames, and feeling all was well with the world.
And then I came across an article in the Guardian claiming that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was proposing a ban on wood fires. There was talk of particulates in the air and the general evils of burning stuff.
This piece slightly knocked me out of my smug eco-bubble. Was I a polluter? Should I immediately extinguish the fire and loll by a white metal radiator?
Too late: the following day a large pallet-load of wood, along with a few bags of smokeless coal, was delivered to our house and left in the street. I roped in a younger mouse to help me carry the logs and coal through the house into our backyard – and carried out this procedure as quickly as possible. I was convinced a neighbour would appear and shout out, ‘You do know that’s illegal, don’t you?’
Rather than worrying and remaining ignorant on the matter, I decided to look into the laws and consulted the Government’s website. Sure enough, reports of the death of the wood fire turned out to be exaggerated. However, new laws about burning wood and coal did in fact come into practice in May this year.
In essence, old-style house coal will be banned, and we’ll be allowed to burn only wood that has been properly certified as ‘dry’.
Now here’s a quick note on moisture in wood. It’s a subject I became quite obsessed with when I was a country mouse. One of the first things I learned was that local log merchants liked to claim the wood they delivered was ready to burn, meaning that the moisture in it had more or less vanished – a process that for hardwoods like oak generally takes at least a year.
This turned out not to be the case. Many was the time I sat staring at a miserably smouldering fire that never quite got going. The wood was ‘green’. Full of moisture, it just sat in the wood stove, hissing and producing no heat.
My landlady advised that when it comes to mendacious log merchants, ‘You’ve got to get ahead of them.’ So we started to order the logs a good year before we intended to use them and stored them on pallets outdoors under a cover. I also enjoyed foraging for fallen branches in the woods. There was something wonderfully natural about keeping warm with wood from our immediate neighbourhood.
It now turns out that, as well as producing no heat, green logs are an environmental menace. According to the puritanical bureaucrats at uk.gov:
‘Burning at home, particularly with traditional house coal or wet wood, is a major source of the pollutant PM2.5 – tiny particles which can enter the bloodstream and lodge in lungs and other organs. PM2.5 has been identified by the World Health Organization as the most serious air pollutant for human health.’
Now this sounds crazy, but it’s true. The World Health Organization is against wood-burning and indeed wood-gathering and, it would seem, wood all round. In this rather chilling attack on the old ways, the WHO says:
‘Fuel-gathering increases the risk of musculoskeletal damage, consumes considerable time for women and children, limits other productive activities (such as income generation) and takes children away from school. In less secure environments, women and children are at risk of injury and violence during fuel-gathering.’
In other words, stop wandering round pretty woods risking musculoskeletal damage and get a proper job.
Around the same time that I returned to the city from the country, my friend Joy Lo Dico moved from Soho to a wood in Dorset, where she manages 120 acres of woodland. Fuel-gathering, she says, is a win-win situation: ‘In ye olde days, not only did wood provide your heating as firewood and your security as fence posts, but also the sudden opening of the woods became a playground for birds, bees, wildflowers, insects – all that good biodiversity stuff.’
And, at The Land magazine, forester Mike Gardner says that the new regulations will have a pretty awful effect on local wood-suppliers. The cost of getting your wood certified, he reckons, could be over £800 a year. As with other attacks on the old ways, these apparently well-motivated laws, pushed by public-health experts, will make life worse for the small people.
The message is hardly new: keep the home fires burning. Just don't burn green wood.
Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Live in the Country (Unbound) is out now
The Oldie December 2021
