It’s leaning towards the end of October – time to wind the clocks back so let’s wind ’em all the way back to 2005 when I lived in my ancient converted bakery/millhouse on the Welsh border.

As ever with these old cottages ‘improvements’ never stop and any man worth his salt in the DIY biznez would have a pickup truck and a chainsaw.

There’s not much room in that little house once you allow for the walls being a metre thick but having built up that door and installed patio doors in place of the window I managed to squeeze my new logburner into the corner where the door had been. Got that?

I certainly did and earned myself a short stay in hospital when my ambition was to prove more than my body could take. Sandstone blocks are heavy things and it didn’t help that when I broke the wall out under the window I found a sandstone lined culvert which had been the outfall for the watercourse used to drive the original millwheel.

Surprise – surprise! Dry now – it had run all the way under the house from front to back till it would merge with the stream at the bottom of the garden which eventually joined the River Severn a couple of miles or so downstream..

No worries – bodies repair themselves and with the hard work done it was off over the border into Wales to where the ash trees were going cheap – if you cut and hauled them home by yersel.

That was when my L200 came into it’s own.

She was a proper workhorse —

She carted everything from bikes to building materials and logs to name but a few.

and no – I didn’t cut my leg off – at least not on that occasion. The 17 stitches I have in my right thigh muscle are from a mishap while building a coffee table for my first house down in Nottingham in the late sixties.

Decking laid —

tool shed and logshed built —

The tough L200 earned it’s place in my heart —

as I became proficient with the chainsaw and the logpile grew.

Even Midge was impressed no end —

especially when winter arrived.

Magic!