A clean sweep
Herself wants a fire.
I assume she means in the front room where there is a fireplace. I try to fulfill her requests but a fire anywhere else would probably burn the house down. I would have to draw the line at that.
So yesterday I set about the task of sweeping the chimney. This may sound like a simple job, especially as we haven’t lit a fire there since I last swept it. So why sweep it now, you ask?
Rooks!
Those worthless avians have a habit of building a nest in my chimney pot. This requires a lot of work on their part as the engineering principle is quite simple. Any engineer will tell you that the first principle of good building is good foundations. And the problem with building foundations in a vertical cylinder is that there is no base.
The fucking rooks overcome the foundation problem by just dropping stuff down the stack. Twigs, sticks, sheeps’ wool, or anything that comes to hand/beak. All this crap is dumped down my chimney until presumably something becomes wedged in the pot, whereupon they build their nest. Though this time I think they just filled the entire stack to the brim.
So I am left with a two-story chimney stack full of sticks and twigs. Of course I could just set a match to the twigs in the hearth but that fire would rapidly become a vertical bomb which at the very least would crack the chimney lining. So I’m left with the job of removing all the shit the fucking rooks have dropped down.
So far I have removed two very large boxfulls, and still the chimney is blocked. Yesterday I managed to send a rod the full way up so it stuck out waving in the evening breeze. However, try as I might, I can’t get the brush up. It goes up about twelve feet but then gets stuck. I have no idea what’s causing the blockage but at a rough guess it’s a few branches that are wedged up there.
I was knackered after a while so I left it. I have to return to it again today as I left the room in a mess with black sooty rods all over the floor, a few dust sheets and a mountain of twigs in the hearth I still have to dump. I’m not looking forward to it.
The things I do for that woman!
I had problems with nesting, and then two years ago, one fell down the chimney and got stuck. Needless to say, no tradesman in England can be bothered with such a small job, so it took ages to get her free. Next day I bought a wrought-iron grille in she shape of a conical witches hat and fitted it to the chimney pot. The chimney still works fine but the birds (jackdaws for me) can’t get through to build anything. Even better, because of that cone shape, it’s uncomfortable for them to perch on it for any length of time, so since I fitted it, they’ve tended to go elsewhere. Cost me about £30.
Now I just have to face the wrath of a witch with no hat, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch!
Indeed I intend to get a “witches hat” as a permanent fix. It means I won’t be able to sweep the chimney again but we rarely use that fire. The only problem is getting it up onto the pot. That’s a problem for another day.
You need the “pig’s willie” attachment for the rods to hook the sticks out. Then a cap for the flue to stop the buggers doing it again – preferably a good grade stainless steel as the ordinary ones rot away in a couple of years. Also, if you have good access to the chimney from a flat roof it is much easier to sweep the chimney from top to bottom than bottom up (once stick free).
Sadly my only access to the chimney is to shin up a 45 degree edging to the slates and then, straddling the ridge, I have to inch my way across to the pot. I have done it in the past [there’s a lovely view from up there] but that was about fifty years ago.