The promised morning post

"Joy cometh in the morning" which is one of the lovely ideas in the psalms, and it wouldn't be so striking if the psalms were all full of sweetness and light. Perhaps their writers had someone at their elbow saying, 'Do you think you ought to put that, darling? It looks so angry', and he would reply 'Well it's how I feel; read on to the end'.

So I thought I'd start the promised 'morning blog post' by remembering that just round the corner is this lovely view of a path that will take you straight into the hills, or down towards Shore and its lovely pub the King William IV, the 'King Bill' as it's known. King Bill

Another thing that brings me joy in the morning is that I head straight for the cupboard under the stairs as soon as I wake up, to the electricity meter to check the reading, and after a few experiments with setting the storage heaters at various levels, I find I can afford to run this house on my modest income, and believe you me it is modest, which is not to say I'm not very thankful that it is there. So I put the kettle on, and come back with my 2 figures and enter them into my book, then back to bed with coffee to contemplate the day ahead. As for my swipe at readers of the Readers' Digest, (a pile of these would appear out of nowhere at my parents' house, and I was glad of it) I confess to being somewhat addicted to that long last article that always appeared in there, typically some gripping yarn entitled 'Rattlesnake in my rucksack' and often involving cutting off one's leg to survive, and I think I've been shaped by these into hoping for some adventure in life; now it seems that merely selling and buying a house has elements of it! But let's hope my leg stays on.

I tried to fill in a form online to describe my house, one of these with a lot of boxes to tick, and I felt so cross that I had to say 'No, the property does not boast central heating throughout, nor even partially', as I believe storage heaters in most rooms doesn't count. This is a shame, because they are such a good way to heat the house, and combined with the multi-fuel stove that appears in quite a few blog posts, you have the perfect heating system, economical, totally quiet, and with no central boiler to go wrong. Those big brown things you may remember from your youth are nothing like the modern slim versions. Since they take in oomph
overnight, they are marvellous for standing a clothes horse next to, and a box of wood too, for getting the wood for the stove bone dry. If you have them on at a low level to get you through the getting out of bed stage - which would be very low and economical - you can go out to work and know that in the evening you can come home to some background heat and light up the stove for a warm glow to sit round. I even warm up my dinner on the stove if I have something frozen that just needs re-heating. It's a Dunsley Hilghlander 5 Enviroburn, and I don't think you'll find anything better.

Look, I'm not really a morning person myself, and I just wrote this mostly before 8 am, so I think this house is having a good effect on me, as I usually wake up feeling much better than the night before, and certainly yesterday's rail journey involving four rather cold trains and a windy cold 40 minute wait in the open air at Mirfield (so not like Adlestrop) didn't do my mood any favours as you will see from the previous post.