First things first. I never expected to be (mis)quoting Xmas songs – particularly in mid-January, but there you are!

Second things second. I know that, as a True Brit, I should have written Aubergine Roasting on an Open Fire, but it doesn’t scan. I needed a spondee rather than a dactyl. Oh, the benefits of a classical education! (I can still, ludicrous as it may sound, recite from memory the first line of the Horace ode I declaimed in the London schools Latin poetry-speaking competition I was entered for 57 years ago.)

In addition, I used to call the vegetable aubergine when I lived in Britain, when only a deranged Frenchman would consider the abomination fit to eat. Take a beautiful silky-smooth, glossy, deep-purple bulbous object, looking for all the world like a Henry Moore sculpture, then burn it until the skin is only fit to throw away and you are left with amorphous greyish-mushroom gunk, and then eat it? Are you mad? Now, of course, I call it chatzilim (Them chatzilim? It chatzil?), and I know that it is ambrosial. So, the word aubergine carries inappropriately negative associations for me, whereas I am indifferent to the word eggplant.

Third things third. Chestnuts were, when we left Portugal at the end of November, in high season, and to be seen everywhere. I will try to find an opportunity to write more about them sometime soon, but, in the interests of accuracy, you need to know that Tslil roasted chestnuts in our new Electrolux oven, and very tasty they were, too (but, somehow, ‘Chestnuts roasting in an Electrolux oven’ hasn’t quite got the same ring to it), and it was chatzilim that Shir (the kids’ ‘business’ partner) wrapped in aluminium foil and roasted on the open fire, then transformed and blended magically into a baba ganoush to die for.

By the way, we have a coat cupboard in the downstairs hall of our home in Israel, and, although Bernice and I never put anything in there but coats and the occasional hat, nevertheless sometimes, when we are fast asleep upstairs, all sorts of objects make their way to the cupboard and set up home there (in much the same way as street cats do in our garden). So, you will suddenly discover, one morning, that a colony of handbags has moved in, or a small family of empty jam jars, or a close-knit community of useful pieces of string. Why am I telling you this? Because I sometimes open the cupboard door, and am reminded somehow of what the inside of my mind must look like.

(I was going to write here: ‘But I digress’. However, on reflection, it seems a little superfluous to point that out.)

Trees in the forestry around the village are regularly felled, sawn into logs and transported away, all by huge combined felling and logging equipment on caterpillar tracks, shattering the peace of the forest and causing the only traffic jam we encountered in Portugal, when they blocked the track to the kids’ land one day.

Now, Bernice and I both grew up with open coal fires. In London, my family made its contribution to the London smog of the 1950s (see Series 1, Episode 4 of The Crown, which is not guilty of exaggeration). In South Wales, Bernice’s family lived in a market town at the foot of a coal-mining valley. So, we both know about going out to the coalshed in the garden on a freezing-cold winter’s day and shovelling coal into the scuttle. We in London had all mod cons, including a mains gas point by the fire and a gas poker we used to light the fire. Bernice’s family, on the other hand, used the traditional twists of paper, on top of which a mound of coal was stacked (leaving plenty of gaps in the structure for air to feed the flames).

(If you haven’t read the quintessentially English Cold Comfort Farm, from which that last reference is taken, you can read about it here. As a parody of the ‘loam and lovechild’ genre, it is, without a doubt, not to everyone’s taste, and so very un-21^st Century as to be surely due for a revival, but, if you have read any of the doom-laden, dark-family-secret, rural novels that came out of Britain in the 1920s and 30s and that it gently mocks, then you should enjoy it.)

The second difference, which arises directly from the first, is that any given quantity of wood burns much more quickly than the same quantity of coal. In real terms, this means that maintaining a roaring fire requires taking on two extra staff – a porter and a stoker. The alternative is to devote your entire day to tending the fire. This is particularly true because wood burns more idiosyncratically than coal.

In addition, because the units of wood (the technical term is logs) are considerably larger and more unwieldy than the units of coal (the technical term is lumps), building a wood fire requires a much more comprehensive education in civil engineering than building a coal fire does.

Finally, initially lighting a wood fire is a lengthier and more nerve-wracking experience. When, after several failed attempts, with long-handled matches, spills of paper, candles, cardboard and bark, you finally manage to get the bloody thing to light, you need to watch it like a hawk. If it is true that a watched pot never boils, then it is equally true, in my experience, that an unwatched fire never stays alight. I managed to light one fire successfully during our month-long stay, but, on the whole, I preferred to delegate, to Micha’el and Bernice, the wood-fetching duties, the edifice building, and the ignition.

On the positive side, a wood fire leaves much less ash than a coal fire. Riddling, shovelling and disposing of ash are not the time-consuming tasks that they are with a coal fire.

A word about fire-lighting materials. We could have bought, in the supermarket, firelighters – those cubes that feel like polystyrene foam, look like giant sugar lumps, and smell disgusting. However, since Micha’el and Tslil want to save the (very little) ash that the wood fire leaves, to do something mysterious with it on their land, we did not want to pollute it with chemical firelighters.

So, instead, we used the materials we had at hand. You may remember from an earlier post that we ordered a lot of goods from Amazon, and this meant that, by the time it grew cold enough for a fire, we had an impressive store of cardboard from the various boxes that the goods were transported in. Even better as a firelighting material is wood bark, and so Bernice and I were always on the lookout for bark debris, every time we took Tao for a walk in his buggy. I must say that the wood bark burned strong and long, and was really good for starting the fire. Bark-gathering soon became second nature, so much so that, after our return to Israel, when a particularly windy night had left the pavement strewn with debris from the palm tree at the corner of our street, I had to resist the temptation to pick it all up to take home.

Sadly, our wood hearth is not the most efficient method for heating the house. A lot of the heat escapes up the chimney, and, since the open staircase leads directly from the salon/living room/lounge, more heat escapes upstairs. We will need to think about long-term solutions to this, probably starting by installing a significantly more efficient wood-burning stove in the existing fireplace.

Meanwhile, we have all been reminded of just how spellbinding are the dancing flames of an open fire…. even if there are no chestnuts roasting on it.

If you would like to see more of our home in Portugal, and our adorable grandson (though not necessarily in that order), Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video devoted to Tao on their youtube channel this week. Who knows? You might even want to subscribe, like and spread the word.