Gorgeous sunny crispy day

Gorgeous sunny crispy day yesterday, though with 10cm snow on the ground and –8º overnight. I took Cass out on the long rein into the big field to frolic and she frisked about like crazy, kicking up her heels and jumping about. Alessio went down on his hands and knees and started crawling along in the snow and Cass thought that was totally bizarre, stared at him with her eyes out on stalks and her nostrils flared, and then turned round and shot away, trampling on my foot in the process. I kept hold of her and got her calmed down, but I can see my spook-busting programme needs a teeny bit more work.

Latest disaster is our boiler has broken down, which we’re especially pleased about as not only is it a weekend, but it’s one of the coldest weekends of the winter so far. The Archimedes screw that delivers the fuel from the hopper to the firebed has broken in some way, so it’s a major problem. (Our boiler is a huge industrial-looking beast that lives in an external room, and runs on sansa, which is the dry, granular residue left over from crushing olives for oil – a waste-product eco-fuel.) John is trying to take apart the inner workings but it’s very heavy work and even once it’s all opened up I can’t imagine he’ll be able to fix it himself. It’ll need a fabbro (metalworker), I guess, and some bespoke steelwork with a hefty price-tag.

So we have no hot water or central heating and it’s very cold today (it’s 0º outside right now, midday). Luckily we planned for all eventualities when furnishing this house, so we have our fantastic woodburning stove now going full pelt. The living room, at least, is warm and toasty, and we have pans of water on it so that we have hot water whenever we need it for washing and so on. Later we’re going to try starting the boiler itself, as it’s meant to be able to run on wood, with a manual rather than automatic feed. We’ve never tried this but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work, and that would give us hot water for showers and radiators for as long as we could be bothered to keep the fire in the boiler stoked.

Life in the wilds sometimes feels harder than it should be.