Clean sweep

Getting a new chimney sweep is rather like changing your doctor or dentist, I find. There's a bit of anxiety as to whether you'll feel at ease with one another and if there'll be a mutual understanding about what needs doing. (There's a common concern with pipes and orifices I suppose.)

My two previous sweeps were very agreeable fellows and were always good for a chat. I was sorry to see each of them finally retire. But Mr Henderson today proved to be a worthy successor. (The dog took to him instantly.) He's not a local lad, but comes from Hampshire in southern England and he spent most of his working life in heavy haulage: all he knew of Wales were the busy roads of the industrial areas between Cardiff and Swansea. But his wife persuaded him to take a week's holiday in Pembrokeshire and, like so many others, he fell in love with it. They moved here and he took what work he could find before apprenticing himself to a chimney sweep, learning the trade, and eventually taking over the business. Now he sweeps chimneys from Aberystwyth to St David's and makes a very good job of it. He joins the ranks of others, such as social workers driving buses and musicians making cheese, who have changed their occupations to live in West Wales.

Here you see him screwing together the rods that will take the brush up and out of the top of the chimney, after he'd placed a large board with a hole in the centre across the hearth and draped a cloth over that in order to minimise sooty fall-out. In the foreground is his vacuum cleaner over which he has draped his leather jacket. He left no mess at all.