Wood Mania

Wood is a big deal here. A big big deal. In all directions, we are surrounded by woods, as you may be sick of hearing. Then there’s the wood-burning stove which is beautiful and excellently efficient at heating the upstairs bedroom. The floors are chestnut, the roof trusses and beams are oak, our two main tables are made of a wood so dark and thick it looks fossilised. This suits him indoors down to the grain of his being, the root and branch of his very self. Even before we moved here, he had a slight but under-control wood fetish – we had to have stripped floors, wooden kitchen units, and, at his insistence, lovely beech kitchen surfaces which need loads of work to keep them from turning a slimy black.


Here, where wood, like love, is all around, this mild fetish is turning in to a full-blown mania.
He is not alone. In this area, every Frenchman appears to be obsessed with his woodpile. It’s the one of the key local products. The Limousin region is famous, not for wine or cheese, but for beef and wood, and of course, many people are employed in forestry and associated work. But, throughout the winter, the thing you notice in this village and surrounding countryside is that there is a constant wood-race going on, every chap with an axe or chainsaw is out in his garden, his backfield, chopping and chipping, stacking and restacking, trying to make his own wood pile the neatest, the most stylishly stacked, the best and the BIGGEST. If French woodpiles are anything to go by, we are in for a new Ice Age any year now. Or Nuclear Winter. Or the collapse of the energy infrastructure.


People here hoard wood. All the French people we have met have been generous and warm, but where wood is concerned they become – sorry, have to say it, mes amis – a wee bit tight. They won’t give it away, well who would? But they even hate selling it. Even wood merchants hate selling wood. We ran out before Christmas. Typical townies. Typical English. Foolish wood virgins. Could we find any more locally? In a place where the wood grows on trees? We could not.

We asked around. People whispered names and telephone numbers behind their hands as if we’d asked them where we could locate a crack cocaine supplier. We phoned up or called round. Malhereusement, non! Desole, non! Non! Non! Non! Eventually we located someone who would sell us a bit, not too much, at a certain price, for which we were truly, grovellingly, grateful.


The thing is that this has just made him indoors even more obsessed. He has become very French in the wood department. Maybe he’s always been French. He wants to buy a wood but in the meantime he wants to go home to Manchester and concrete over the back garden so there’ll be space for his woodpile.

And we’ve got gas fires and central heating.