The Wood Age

People often ask me what D does now he has retired. Well he spends a lot of time doing stuff with wood. For Christmas, I gave him two books about wood - one was "The man Who Made Things out of Trees" by Robert Penn, and the other a rather beautiful book called "Norwegian Wood" by Lars Mytting. Mytting describes something called 'the wood age' in retired men, when they start to spend huge amounts of time (98 hours a year, apparently) preparing the wood for next winter. 98 hours doesn't seem that much to me. It takes a long time to find the wood, chop it down (by hand), bring it to the woodshed, saw it (by hand) and  stack it. He is already warm even before we have built and lit the fire!
I think that this might be the tidiest part of our house..