There's No Smoke...

Back in the old days (pause for younger readers to yawn) you did not fragrance away odours, you opened a window.
"Were they keeping bloody goats in here?" my father said thirty six years ago, the morning we moved into this house.
No, the previous owners had kept dogs, one of which had been incontinent. So the first thing my father did was to open the kitchen window.
The window had been painted over, but my dear old dad, still complaining loudly about the malodorous cloud the vendors had left in their wake, gave it a good shove. The whole rotten window frame fell out and crashed into the garden.
The kitchen thus pushed itself up to the top of the list of our many renovations.

We bought an Aga because it suited the aesthetic and age of the house, not because I had the remotest intention of ever baking bread in it. Style over substance. In some ways.
It actually served us loyally. For thirty years it was the hub of the house: we did not have central heating because with low ceilings the whole house was warmed by this glorious chrome and enamel range. It was always a bit chilly between bedroom and bathroom but we were young enough to run like hell.
People gravitated towards the Aga as a source of comfort, and it even cooked food. A wonderful place to dry off children's dripping art work til it crumpled like seersucker, and a great place to   festoon with drying underwear. I can almost feel nostalgia for the rusty-orange scorch marks on socks after they'd competed with saucepans on the hotplate.

We also had an open fire. At least we did in the early days. That was until the thrill of being a log-carrier, fire-layer, and cinder-gatherer wore thin. And eventually the smoke, no matter how often the chimney was swept, habitually enveloped us, reducing us to kippers. With young children's lungs to protect we then invested in one of the first gas-fired Veri-flames, an authentic-looking coal fire.
We have never looked back.

Well, we did a few years ago when wood-burning stoves became all the rage. The smell of woodsmoke is a powerful draw, and such a stove would have looked champion in our hearth. However, memory served me well and saved me from a return to intensive fire-maintenance.

So Tuesday's paper vindicated my decision, but from an ecological  point of view. According to the Royal College of Physicians almost a tenth of London's winter air pollution is attributable to wood burning stoves. Obviously rising traffic is also an issue but so are gas cookers and air fresheners.
Air fresheners? I do hope they mean those nasty little plug in ones they warned us about years ago that can cause asthma...
And surely not the fragrance diffusers like True Grace's Library which simulates to perfection the smell of a log-burning fire ?

Bugger it. I'm going to live dangerously.
Or I might just open a window.