You can’t beat a good fire. But sometimes it can leave you cold
Stalingrad must have been like this. Blood frozen in the veins; icicles hanging off the nose; the desperate longing to be shot and released from -30 degree despair. Yes, two days into the first cold snap of the winter and my drawing room fire is on the blink.
It’s been coming. Two years ago, midway through a piece of ‘must see’ TV – Welsh First Minister’s Questions, or something equally compelling – the imitation woodburner lapsed into idling mode, whirring away gently without actually giving off any heat. Normal service was eventually resumed, but the pattern has recurred at frequent and frozen intervals ever since.
Fixing faulty equipment, however, is not as easy as it was. Time was when a little man would have come up from the village with an oil can, a flat cap and a deferential manner to solve the problem for a fiver and a slice of homemade cake.
Not now. Once a product is out of guarantee, finding someone to repair it is about as easy as locating the Golden Fleece. The company from which I had bought the fire did offer to send someone round, but for a fee of £140 – twice as much as I’d paid for the fire in the first place.
In essence, this would have been like buying a brand new Aston Martin for £150,000, finding that it was starting to lose power on the hills, and then ringing up the garage to be told that a mechanic would have a quick look for a bill of 300 grand.
Had I thought about a new fire, sir? Well, no, I hadn’t. This was because the present one was less than four years old; and while I wasn’t expecting it to last as long as Hadrian’s Wall, I was at least hoping that it would outstrip Eldorado.
Standing idle in the front room, destined eventually to be collected for recycling, is its predecessor: a basic two-bar affair embellished by a naff imitation of coal. No one ever pretended that it was elegant – it was so ugly, in fact, that it could easily have scooped the Turner Prize – but it served our family for 40 years before sliding into terminal decline.
Alas, longevity has fallen from fashion. From fires to phones to football managers, change is cool; continuity the province of the quaint, torn-sleeved eccentric.
During a recent Newsnight debate on authoritarianism and the troubling re-emergence of the strongman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum laid much of the blame at the door of our collective impatience. In a social media age, in which solutions to complex problems can be microwaved to readiness in 140 characters of bile, democracy in its traditional, representative forms can seem a tedious and cumbersome beast. Ringing out the old and ringing in the new is no longer just for New Year’s Eve: it is the modus vivendi for today.
And so I sit like some shivering Canute beside my erratic fire, refusing on principle to change it, willing it back to health through the power of persuasion and prayer. Stalingrad may be over, but the battle against the throwaway society goes on.
To read another one of Richard's rye observation pieces click here
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