[mouldering ancestral pile] adventures with furnishings

One of the things the refurbished mouldering ancestral pile contains is a wood stove.

And so, a few weeks ago, my mother was grousing to me that this meant that among all the other infinitely many things the house still somehow needed was a set of fire irons.

Aha, says I, I actually just saw a set of those get offered on the local Freecycle. Want me to ask for it?

She did. I did. It was spoken for. But the person very kindly wrote back and said that if they were a no-show, we had next refusal. Thank you very much, I said, and at least for your sake I hope it doesn't come to that!

The original claimants were a no-show.

So off I shipped Adam, into the night, and he returned with fire irons in the back of the car, and left them there on the grounds that it's not like we needed them in the London flat, and I blithely ignored them until it came time to pack the car (and even then paid them only enough attention to tangle them up in the legs of the folding garden chairs).

We got to Cornwall, and I blithely ignored them some more except insofar as necessary to move them from the boot to the hearth.

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