Glee

The stove is finally here. I installed it last night and have gleefully been stoking and fuelling and gazing into it ever since, aside from a brief and very distracting bout of work. Slow cooking is apparently all the rage at the moment which is good for morale as TLB and I both require a little practice getting the thing hot enough to rapidly heat things up, but once we were up to cooking temperature there was no stopping us.

It is just an object, a few bits of metal organised to perform a function but in only 24 hours it already feels like the heart of the tent. It exudes heat and charm in equal measure and with a little practice will smoulder away in perpetuity, providing for our most basic needs. As you can probably tell, I am a bit rapt with the romanticism of it all.

We now have everything we need and more, why anyone would doubt that this is the perfect way to live completely escapes me. I had a guest last night as TLB had gone to see her father and when he arrived I was most gratified to hear him exclaim 'wow, I thought we were going to be roughing it'. The landlords have also been showing a keen interest in our progress, considering us something of a novelty, and were eager to rush over and see the stove in action when they were on their turkey and pig feeding rounds this evening. I also noticed that the latest round of split logs from this evening were cut much smaller than usual and I suspect that this was because they know that the larger logs will not fit in the stove. I think that we may have to cook them dinner.

We have some guests, including my mother, coming to camp out with us on Saturday which should be lovely. Mum has been dying to make some excursions in her new camper van, Bridget, so we will be able to make the most of chairs and tables and the like but I have a feeling we will all gravitate back in the direction of the stove, to bask in it's glow. I am sure that all of this gushing happiness is rather annoying so I promise to find some proper hardships to endure over the coming days.

In the meantime I am going to put a good sized log on the fire, set the stove to a slow burn and crawl into a nice clean, parentally laundered bed. Nunnight.