The height of cosiness
June 12, 2014
When we moved into the house 16 years ago it’s fair to say it was very, very cold… That winter we had a tarpaulin instead of a roof, since the building work on the new roof had gone on and on, through autumn, and well into the windy, wuthering weather of a Pennine winter. One night we got back late from a very posh do to find the tarpaulin had blown off in a high wind and was heading at some speed towards Lancashire… Rain was pouring through the naked rafters and filling up the house fast, so, at 2am, in ballgown and black tie, we set to with mops and buckets to sop up the worst of it. That was the beginning of our coldest ever winter.
Nights were perishing, even cocooned in bed in woolly hats and fingerless gloves, wound into a selection of duvets. We warmed 2p pieces – like Kay and Gerda in The Snow Queen – to make peepholes in the ice on the inside of the windows. We were using Calor gas stoves in a couple of rooms, but the warmth never reached further than a couple of feet from the stove, and you can’t spend your day anchored to a Calor-gas cylinder. Though we did try, to be fair…
Over the years to come we installed underfloor heating beneath the ground floor-flags, which hadn’t been moved since being laid in 1634. Underfloor heating revolutionised our lives, and downstairs was suddenly warm and cosy – you could use all the rooms! Upstairs, though, remained unheated until very recently, when, mindful of our poor guests visiting through the winter, we installed some extremely beautiful and powerful Swedish wood-burning stoves that kick out 7KW of heat.
Now we have our logs delivered by Tommy from Bingley Logs – two tonnes at a time – and this morning spent a very satisfying couple of hours wheeling and stacking this lot, ready to carry up to the bedrooms.
And when those logs are in the stove, and it’s burning away merrily on the hearth, it looks like this – the height of cosiness. Ponden Hall is finally warm, and it feels wonderful.
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Seed potatoes are the first veg in at Ponden
When I was about 38 I read a magazine article that claimed everyone past the age of 40 got interested in gardening. Everyone. Not me, mate, I thought. I will never be interested in gardening, and that is a fact.
I still can’t claim to be interested in herbaceous borders or hardy perennials, but I must admit I have been doing a bit of daydreaming recently about growing vegetables. To the point where I’m actually doing something about it. Mainly because they are free food. It just makes good economic sense that if you have a spare patch of soil, you could be raising things in it to feed your family at next to no cost. Plus I remember the glorious smell of my grandfather’s homegrown tomatoes and runner beans. And maybe old age is catching up with me after all…
So now the thinking has finally converted into some real action. I bought two packets of seed potatoes yesterday, and today I actually found a spade, got myself out to the garden, dug up a long patch of flowerbed, and planted them, 20cm apart, as the instructions told said I should. According to the packet I’m right at the end of the time for planting, but fingers crossed they’ll still take.
I’ve chosen potatoes for my first foray into vegetable gardening purely because so many people have told me they are idiotproof – anyone can grow them. And planting them certainly seemed straightforward. I’ll let you know how they go on.
As an added bonus, while I was out there I discovered a lavish crop of wild garlic, which is definitely something I’m interested in using in the kitchen. My 14-year-old daughter recently ate at the luxurious Cliffemount Hotel, in Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire, while she was out for the day with her friend Tilly – and ordered a soup she raved about for days afterwards – spinach and wild garlic.
I have spinach. Now I have wild garlic. Watch this space…
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