Our neighbour, the builder, had brought back some old floorboards he'd taken out of someone's house during a job. For us, it's free firewood. I sawed them all to pieces on Saturday, and during Sunday we burnt the lot.
What I wanted to find out was the difference between our summer and winter gas costs per day. Never really calculated that, simply swore at the gas bill each winter. Turns out during the summer, when our heating isn't on and it's only our hot water plus cooking and baking, we spend about 50p a day on gas. In the winter, it's £4.60 a day. Right now, it's getting quite cool outside during the evenings and nights, down to 7 degrees. And yet, we've been able to put off putting the central heating on because a) the cavity wall insulation is keeping the warmth in, b) we're better at using curtains at night and c) we're burning scavenged wood in the stove, starting in the morning and letting the fire burn through to the evenings, thus saving ourselves at least £4 every day we do this. That's £4 daily that we're not feeding to the moloch that's our energy company. That feels excellent.
Instead, we're cycling it right back into our Living Like Kings budget: on Saturday, we went to our fishmonger and got ourselves 2 kilos of mussels and a little bag of brown shrimp, a real local delicacy that is unbeatable on a plain roll with just a little lemon juice. Then we hopped round our local butcher's who didn't have any venison in that day but who provided us with another lamb shank (see separate post). He did say that if we wanted game, he'd ring his game-keeper and he'd get us a whole deer in. And next month would be time for whole hares. Can't wait!
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