Fire! Or how I learned to become a “ramoneur”.

After two freezing winters ("it never snows here," said the French neighbours), we decided that the romantic appeal of the 'poêle à bois' was becoming rather jaundiced. With firewood available from our little copse, and generous grants available from the French state, we decided the time had come to install wood fired central heating. (So ecological, so cheap, so simple!).

The first few weeks after our wood powered central heating was installed proved to be a revelation. Within 30 minutes of a fire blazing in the firebox, the 200 litre tank was full of scalding-hot water; the kitchen was tropical; the tiny bathroom with its oversized radiator suddenly became a sauna! We could even bake good bread and roast potatoes in the stove's oven. We planned pineapples in the parlour and date palms in the dining room!

We had no doubt we'd made a good investment, and now we could face the coming winter with equanimity, whatever it threw at us. We even had a big tax refund to look forward to the next year.

We didn't worry too much about the strange twisting chimney and I mentally made a note to call the 'ramoneur' at the end of the winter.

It was about three months later, in late December that the problems began. For some inexplicable reason, the cooker wasn't as efficient as it had been. Smoke blew out from under the hot plates every time the kitchen door was opened and shut. The oven refused to reach temperatures much above 100C. The radiators were tepid and the wood sulked and refused to burn, preferring to smoulder.

Desperate to get the cooker going one morning, my wife piled on lots of twigs. She opened up the ventilation, pulled out the ashtray, and left the stove door ajar to let more draught penetrate.

She put a match to the scrunched up paper beneath the twigs. The paper burst into flame and she turned her back on the fire. It was time to feed the cats and dogs.

Five minutes must have passed when I came downstairs and into the kitchen. I had heard what I guessed was a MIG-15 buzzing the house, but now I heard a loud roaring noise like a blowtorch on speed. The cooker was gently pulsating and the chimney tube was glowing cherry-red. The kettle on the hob was pouring steam and the kitchen was rapidly becoming a Turkish bath.

Rushing outside to find my wife, I saw black smoke pouring from the chimney and there was an acrid stench of incinerating soot.

My wife came rushing back from serving the cats' breakfast, to discover why I was panicking and screaming.

"The house is on fire," I roared.

Back in the kitchen, I continued panicking while she calmly thrust wet towels against the front of the firebox door, sealing off all the air. The towels were soon adding their steam and smoke to the fume-filled kitchen.

But after another five minutes, the roaring began to subside; the stove groaned, then gulped in protest and began to cool down.

Ten minutes passed, during which the chimney tubes, once pristine shining stainless steel, changed colour from glowing red to a shade of burnt-caramel.

They were still too hot to touch.

Another half hour passed, and realization dawned; perhaps it was time to sweep the chimney!

Now, I'd heard all about chimney sweeping 'rules'. I knew our chimney should be swept once a year. I knew that if you had a fire and the chimney hadn't been swept by a card-carrying certified chimney sweep, with a doctorate in 'ramonage', then your insurance was invalid. And the 'pompiers' would ask you to pay their bill if they had to turn out for a chimney fire. This was French regulation at its worst.

How to Sweep a Chimney in One Easy Lesson

The next day we telephoned an English friend, a self-taught plumber, who was prepared to turn his hand to anything when asked.

At this point, the thought of dismantling the warped and disfigured chimney tubes caused me some trepidation. But it had to be done. To remove them, I had to lever off the heavy metal plates which formed the top of the cooker and then wrestle the whole assembly sideways until it came away from the base.

Ten minutes, three falls, and a submission later and it was done. But would a chimney brush go horizontally through the wall, and twist its way into the vertical chimney?

Our friend wasn't even going to try. He was determined to sweep the chimney from the top, down. This was the macho approach. Sweeping from the bottom was for wimps!

Shinning up a ladder, and borrowing a wonky home-made roof ladder made of fragile, wormy timbers, he managed to crawl safely up the chimney breast, where he removed the chimney cover and found the egress of the tubing. He thrust his sweep's brushes down the tube and twisted them round and round. Meanwhile, in the kitchen below, I stood balanced precariously on a stool, a bucket in my hand, hovering below the tube where it came through the wall.

Two or three tiny fragments of black 'coke' rattled down the tube into the bucket with a faint 'plonk'. These were followed by a dozen tiny particles of soot. And that was all. Where was the rest?

Before I could ask our friend, he had slid back down the roof to safety and had come in to inspect the fruits of his labour.

"Couldn't have been very dirty!" he snapped, seeing the pathetic quantity of black powder and ash in my bucket. I explained about the chimney fire, and he gave a grunt:

"Must have burnt out all your soot. Your chimney's been cleaned by the fire. "

He laughed, "But don't do it again, it's highly dangerous. The tube could melt and the fire could spread into the main chimney and set your house on fire."

But the job had been accomplished. We could now relax. We sat down at the kitchen table, and opened a celebratory bottle of Pastis. We topped up each glass with water from the well, and congratulated each other in the traditional way.

"Santé, prospérité et bonheur!" I joked. And then we talked about the trials and tribulations of wood stoves, chimneys, homes full of dust and wood ash, and the on-going debate about whether chimneys should be swept bottom-up, or top-down.

An hour later he staggered from the table and clambered into his car.

Feeling confident that I was now capable of solving any problem thrown at me, I reassembled the stove and forced the recalcitrant 'snake' back into place. Convinced the wood stove was as good as new, I built a large fire in the firebox and put a match to it.

For some peculiar reason, the match went out as soon as I held the flame in the firebox. I tried again. The same thing happened.

Finally, with the third match the paper began to burn anaemically, but the smoke billowed back into the room.

"Must be too cold," I thought. "As soon as the fire heats up, the smoke will go straight up the nice clean chimney."

I shut the stove door and waited.

It must have been just a few seconds later, but by then smoke had begun to pour through the hotplates of the stove. It was even coming from the gaps around the chimney fittings and the edges of the steel plates which comprised the top of the cooker. It was even coming from under the oven door!

For the second time that day I began to panic. I summoned my long-suffering wife to the task of extinguishing the fire, which by now had really begun to take hold. The kitchen was full of smoke, the smoke alarm was bleating in protest, and the dogs had taken cover under the table, whimpering.

We opened the kitchen doors on to terrace beyond and pulled the still-blazing wood on to the gravel, where we doused it with a nearby bucket. The mess was terrible and so was the smell.

"What's happened?" I coughed, angry with my wife for no reason at all. "Why won't the b****y stove work any more?"

Images flashed through my mind: tubes completely parted or burnt through half way up the chimney; dead pigeons jammed in the junctions; hornet nests melted like liquid fudge in the interstices of the cuisiniere.

A return wrestling match was played. Soon the tubing submitted and lay in a warped pile on the kitchen floor.

Next I balanced one-legged on a tiny stool with my hand plunged deeply up the tube through the wall, like James Herriot at the backside of a heifer with a breach birth on a bad day.

Straining further into the pipe, my fingertips came across a mass of thick crusty powder. I scooped some into my palm and extricated my arm, now a deep black colour along its entire length.

"That's your best sweater!" snapped my wife, looking at the now ruined garment!

My hand was full of burnt soot. At the junction of the vertical chimney tube where it met the 90 degree bend, there was a congested mass of soot. Everything our friend had pushed down the chimney was stuck there. A total impasse of soot. And virtually unreachable, unless a friendly orang-utang or a freak from a circus with a love for burnt carbon was somewhere in the vicinity.

A light bulb flashed on in my brain. This is a job for 'Super-Vac'!

Dismayed and disillusioned by our long-suffering Dyson, which positively refused to sweep up plaster, building rubble, metal shavings, sand and mortar dust, without becoming completely blocked, I had made an impulse purchase of a wet and dry R2D2-lookalike from a DIY superstore. This baby was up for anything, and was prepared to get down and dirty. Or so I thought.

Shoving the protesting vaccuum tube into the chimney, it finally made contact with the mass of black sticky magma. There was a sound like someone with chronic constipation who has in desperation been given an overdose of an enema.

Dust and debris hurtled down the vacuum tube into the machine, which coughed loudly in protest and then began to whine as the bag filled, the tube blocked and the flow of soot ended. R2D2 was dismantled (where was C3PO when you needed him?) the tubes unblocked, the filter beaten clean, the bag emptied.

By now the kitchen looked like a landscape after a pyroclastic flow, only everything was black rather than grey.

By the time R2D2 had submitted to his colonic irrigation five times, the chimney was finally clean.

The chimney tubes were reconstructed (it was getting easier each time!) ; the cooker reassembled. Normality had been restored as a refreshing blast of cool air blew up the chimney and a lit match sent its smoke swirling into the darkness beyond.

Now the years have passed and we have grown to live and love our wood central heating. The water is always piping hot; we still bake bread; we run four large radiators. And as long as you don't mind sweeping the chimney at least five times a year, there's absolutely no problem

Practice makes perfect. We have discovered that chimneys can be swept from the bottom up. R2D2 has become proficient at doing his stuff, though his filters are ragged and worn. A good shower soon rids me of the soot on my skin, in my hair, in my eyes and beneath my nails.

It's my clothes that have suffered the most. Most of my sweaters have a left sleeve which is mysteriously darker and dustier than the right.

That's me, 'Le Ramoneur Anglais.' At your service. If you've a difficult chimney to sweep, I'm your man!