I'm more and more impressed with this little fire of mine.

Last night I cooked myself the rest of the oven chips, some baked beans and a veggie burger in the oven. Tonight, leaving the oven open, I cooked a saucepan of pasta, beans and lentils in a kind-of curry sauce. And it's all working really well.

And I think that I've found the secret of heating the room even quicker. A nail has fallen down the back of the fire and as a result I can't close up the ash tray. It's open about a quarter of an inch. and if I open the air intake just a fraction, it roars away like nobody's business. Secondly, if I prop open the lid about 30° when the fire is roaring, the lid deflects all of the heat right into my upper body. Another thing that helps is having turned the divan round so that it is across the room, it acts as a heat-stop and all of the heat is concentrated between me and the fire.

But this morning it was cold in here - 8.2°C in fact. And it's hardly surprising - last night was -16.3°C, the coldest temperature that I have ever recorded here. It was cruel downstairs. Even the orange juice was frozen solid. I had to go to the mairie as well to check over the projector for this exhibition I'm doing, and Caliburn had a little struggle to start - not that I'm surprised.

Back here I made a heat pad with that heated seat pad and some insulation, and throughout the afternoon it melted about 25 litres of water. I'm now seemingly melting more water than I'm using so that's progress of a sort. I've also made much more prgress doing the ceiling in the bedroom, and the unexpectred good side of this is that in moving a lot of the stuff around, I'm finding loads of things that I have misplaced. Knives, saws, the large mitre clamps, and also the missing 650-watt circular saw that I've been seeking for ages.

So tonight, with having a big fire in here, it's quite warm and so I'm off to bed in a minute. Tomorrow I need to use some of that excess water to make some polyfilla stuff to fill the cracks in the plasterboarding that I did the other day. 15 minutes will see me finish the ceiling as far as I can go and I can't do any more until the joints in the wall are sealed and smoothed down.