While they never totally lose their romance, candles are an essential part of our lives at this time of year. There isn’t enough daylight for our solar panel to provide us with electricity for lighting. So every night we dine by candlelight. Lovely. But having to cook and wash-up by candlelight is not great. It’s a little thing, but come the end of the winter, we really appreciate the days getting longer again.
So we know about candles. We’ve discovered that broadly there are two types: ones that burn, leaving behind an unburned substance that drips and clogs up candlesticks; and another type that is clean burning. You can happily stick them in an empty wine bottle and they won’t dribble down the side on to the table and they’ll kindly vacate the space, ready for the next one. While we have no idea what the ingredients are of those two types, we count ourselves lucky that the non dribble ones exist and that we can buy them quite easily locally.
Well quite easily. The Co-op is one source. Or at least it was. Our recent experience served to remind us just how far from the mainstream we are.
“Why aren’t there any candles on the shelf?”
“Candles are a summertime product. We don’t sell them in the winter.”
!
So when the nights are longer and darker, we don’t want candles, right?!
How does this make sense? I suppose it must make sense to someone and may be it is a sign of how lucky we (well most of us) are to have a reliable and seemingly endless supply of electricity.
It’s something we will never take for granted ever again.

we are now entering our fourth winter in the yurt, I think if we’d known that we would be in it still we would have run away. The reality, however, is that the yurt is lovely to live in, though we do face far more challenges than in a house.

It’s funny, everyone worries about us being cold in winter, the true difficulty though is frozen water; whilst we remain cosy in our toasty yurt our water pipes solidify. If we’d known just how long we’d been here we would have sorted out something more permanent and buried the pipe in the ground.

The other difficulty in the depths of winter is the darkness. Our solar panel, which is great spring through to autumn, fails us on the short dark  winter days. Even when we get a bright day we barely get enough energy to keep a single  bulb lit. We have again failed to sort anything out permanently simply because the future has been so uncertain. We have talked about wind turbines or wires across the field. All solutions present their difficulties however and we still haven’t come up with an answer.

Now winter is peering over the horizon again and we won’t be out of the yurt for it. But don’t worry about us being cold in here, we’ll be down to our teeshirts when it’s ~16 outside. We will be bemoaning the fact we can’t see and we have no water however.