(source: James Thomson)
My Christmas and New Year this year were spent in my wife’s village in the east.
Life in such rural communities can be rewarding, but is also hard work.
There is no mains water or sewerage (‘kanalizácia’ in Slovak parlance), so each household draws its own water from a well, whose level rises and falls in mysterious ways (despite snow on the ground, there was little water this Christmas, so showers were rationed).
There is also no mains gas supply, so heating and hot water is mostly provided by a wood-burning boiler (‘kotol’), which must be fed constantly with colossal quantities of logs. These are laboriously moved several times before finally entering the maw of the furnace: once from the forest (provision is surprisingly strictly regulated; you are not allowed to just wander into the woods and collect fallen branches, much less cut your own wood); then from the merchant to the home; then again from the supplier’s truck (if you’re lucky; more often from the pile he has left on the ground), typically by being carried/hurled into a storage barn or stacked under the eaves; yet again, by bucket or wheelbarrow to the room containing the stove; and finally into the flames.
All the while, one must monitor how dry the wood is (ideally, it should be bone dry, but some damp logs inevitably enter the chain; too many and your chimney will tar up). Occasional climate inversions, which trap the village’s fragrant or smelly smoke in the valley, reveal when people are burning material other than wood.
