Absolutely Al…!
I was also reading about pyrolysis a few days back…zero emissions from waste but generating clean energy…
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Are you able to manage without any grid power, for a while, maybe?
My guess at present is that your “mundane” might be my “very difficult”…
Couldn’t remember the correct term earlier, dielectric is probably more accurate than thermopile .
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I could probably cobble something together but I’d rather enjoy the benefits of the grid in my declining years. My grandfather reputedly stuck a waterwheel on to a car generator to provide some light in his Highland butt and ben. Sadly, there are no rivers beside my house.
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Interesting observation Helen, and also worth noting that these words, like most of those you quote, have their ancient origins in the Germanic/Saxon family of languages. Thus ‘Erde’ (earth) and ‘Herz’ (heart). 
Such homely words, pre-dating Latinate or ‘Romance’ alternatives, make up a huge chunk of modern English vocabulary, and have a particular resonance for native English speakers, being very close to home (‘Heim’), and hearth (‘Herd’) .
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…that’s a lovely image, Al, if it gets too warm in France I was thinking of something similar around unforgettable Achiltibuie.
Maybe Scotland will be all European then, and Glasgow the new Carcassonne. For all keen property speculators, now’s the time to find a
countryside butt and ben.
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You asked me a q I didn’t answer.
My stove is outside, on the low wall around my balcony. Not the perfect place, because the rope holding all the bits together, isn’t tight enough, so the whole thing is not very stable, and could collapse into the river. Certainly, a great deal of heat can be generated via the “rocket” system, and the good thing is that it burns anything, rubbish, little twigs, damp wood, etc so people are expanding that design to make ‘whole house’ heating with extra pipes and clay or cob insulation to hold/carry the heat.
Its clean heat, too, no smoke if you get the design right, but you can build one yourself, easily enough I expect, from instructions on the net. Not safe for me, inside, too much paint.
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I love the book I bought a Mountain.
We have just bought six new chickens to replace some of ours which stopped laying.
I will poach them and use the meat to make chicken and leek pies.
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One of my favourites…
My friend Laura who has recently joined SF made a chicken pie a couple of weeks ago, it was delicious.
She hasn’t posted yet, but I know she will be reading…Hi @larua_ayears 
x
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I love Achiltibuie, the excitement of hopping on the boat to Tanera Mor 
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For me its one of those memories drilled deep into subconscious…! A very long and (to me! Wimp!) life threatening hike on the tiny footpath through the Caingorms, a ‘skool trip’… All the wrong kit! ‘Those without proper hiking boots, buy Army boots or you can’t come!’ Three layers of blisters! Jeeeez, torture! Was your school like that!? Plimsoles would have been OK, we didn’t attempt peak mountaineering!
But all so beautiful.
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I looked up dielectric and read an article that made me want to go lie down in a darkened room for a few minutes…
But I’m not very technically minded…there was a paragraph about cells that I was trying to equate with human cells…I’ll have to go read it again…
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Is there a way to make it more stable…???
My water came back on today…I’m on two water supplies here…one from a small syndicate that supplies 18 houses and supplies my kitchen and hot water boiler…that’s the supply that has been off for a few days…
The back of my house and my bathroom is supplied by one of the big water corporations so I always have water but if the little syndicate has a problem then it’s a case of no hot water…
I’m reluctant though to give up on the local syndicate…
When my son was here in the summer and the little local syndicate water went off he warmed up bottles of water in the sun and had a “bush shower” in the garden…
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It’s all magic really💥
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Is it magic or magick…is it always or all ways…why is the word magi in the word imagine…i magi without the magick…??? 
Can you paint with all the colours of the wind…???
Edited to add…favourite song of my three when they were little…x 
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you’ll survive, I wont, although I suppose if push really came to shove I would cook the chickens!
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reminds me of a school trip to the Yorkshire Dales - in the early 70s with again all the wrong kit! We called our boots “pit booits”.
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Survival IS MAGIC! yes. This is my new survival discovery… A FIRE PISTON! If you google ‘fire piston’ you can see there are many on sale, you dont need to be creative with acrylics. They need a micro speck of tinder to start the burn…and it seems CHARCLOTH may work best. There are numerous demos. Charcloth is like charcoal, but made of scorched bits of your cotton denim jeans, cut and rolled. Find instructions for charcloth on YouTube.
Who invented the first fire piston? An iron age woman? Don’t know…it is OLD…
So here you go guys and gals …light your cob/rocket heating cooking system …with…
But I’m glad to have done all that awful stuff, even with appalling kit.
Your school like mine thought pain was good for the soul I suppose. We did another one, to the Loire Valley and Paris and everyone got violently sick. But the superb Loire experience is probably why I’m back in France. 60 years later!
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That’s a shocking problem, with chickens, even if they do nothing useful at all, they become so close, so matey and trusting, they get pampered for decades. They like to forget all the chicken stuff too, and follow the cat through the cat flap to sit by the fire.