Particularly necessary these last few days so here are a few tips. You may, like me, enjoy a lovely cosy cheerful fire as you read your book/mark your pupils' work/procrastinate... so here's how.
First get a big log and a couple of small ones. Carry them all together and realise that you have not only made your newish jersey filthy but that there's also a good chance it has a new hole in it because of the sticky-out bit you hadn't noticed in the dark.
Put the logs down gently so bits of moss don't fly everywhere. They fly everywhere anyway.
Artfully scrumple up a couple of sheets of newspaper and arrange them in the fireplace with a pine-cone or two. Feel smug about using nature's firelighters. Pick the bark off the big log, snip off the rest of your broken fingernail, staunch blood.
Put the pine cones back where you wanted them, then do it again this time more violently.
Lay the logs in the fireplace in a cunning way so they can't fail to catch fire and wedge the blasted pine cones in place. Put the bits of bark you ripped off along with your fingernail on top.
Look for some matches.See that some psychopath puts used matches back in the box and that it is full of them. Find a lighter, ignite corner of artfully scrumpled newspaper. Hear frightful racket from catflap - burn your finger because you aren't looking at what you are doing - the cat has come in with a vole. Catch the cat, rescue the vole, put it out. By the time you have done this your newspaper has burnt away to nothing and the fire, like the vole, is out. Redo the newspaper business, grumpily.
Telephone rings as you use the little bellows to get the fire going, you answer only to discover it is some photovoltaic salesperson asking you how you heat your house. Meanwhile you blew a load of wood ash all over your cleanish black trousers in your rush to get the telephone.
Go back to the fireplace where there is a pile of logs sulking at you insolently, but no glow, no flame, nada.
Go and put on another jersey. Or two.