Just a quick report-back on the idea I floated in that post about building fires. Today was our opportunity to bring the principle of curves to the structure of the daily firelighting ritual. Triangles and rectangles, we said, were all very well, but the addition of curvilinear logs might add some variety. 

I said curves would be more organic, and it was then pointed out to me that the whole thing is organic anyway, because it’s made of wood. Well, yes – but I meant organic in shape, OK? But to do this, careful selection of materials was critical. However, rather than laboriously carve curved sticks – there’s a limit to every obsession – naturally-grown curves were in order.

There’s precedent for this exploitation of nature’s refusal to create straight lines. Those magnificent square-rigged sailing ships that dominated the seas up to the end of the 19th Century were masterpieces of engineering in wood: their many complex bends and arcs were rendered entirely in oak, with the planks skilfully bent with steam to cover a frame made of more substantial beams, whose shape often needed to be created from naturally-curved wood.

For example, the bracket-like elements that functioned as joints between different angles of frame or deck, called ‘knees’, were best created out of naturally-angled parts of the tree. These ‘grown knees’ were known to be stronger due to the way the grain runs through the bend, so that there were no weaker cross-grain cuts (for the cyclists among you, think of the way a skilful framebuilder in carbon fibre creates areas of strength, stiffness and compliance by laying-up the fibres in different directions).

So like an eighteenth-century shipwright, I selected tonight’s firewood carefully, looking for the junctions where branches had grown out from the trunk. There weren’t many – and those I located tended to have just a little bit of an angle – more of a hockey stick than a boomerang, if you get my drift.

These tick-shaped logs were then laboriously split until I had a bundle of about ten dog-legs of wood . . . and I can vouch for the strength of these joins – whacking them with an axe was pretty tough going. These ‘kindling knees’ went into constructing the basis of tonight’s fire.

It’s less cathedral than jelly mould, but the short parts of the hockey sticks came together at the top in a solid platform on which to build a smaller, secondary level — which rather unfortunately has disguised the curvaceous lines of the structure. In the middle, the now obligatory pinecones and twigs provided the initial oomph. And oomph there was: the whole thing went up very nicely and rapidly created the bed of embers required for all-night sustained heat.

The pre-Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro said, “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where others see nothing.” Now I’m not claiming to see anything in a stack of twigs that other can’t see, but it’s certainly fun playing with this stuff. A psychologist may trace this back to my unfulfilled childhood desire for a Meccano set, or to the fascination that comes from building with Lego, but I’m going to go with the theory that all this messing about is moving us toward a more efficient way of warming the family of a night.

If those Napoleonic-era warships are anything to go by, we’re on the right track: all that wood, waterproofed with tar and rigged with canvas sails, made for such remarkably incendiary structures that accidental fires were constantly dreaded.

Research has estimated that a single wooden warship required around 4,000 trees to create; the 300 ships of the Royal Navy in 1790 would have required 1.2 million oak trees to build. Maintenance of these, plus building more during the 23 years of the Napoleonic wars, would have required many times this number.

Given the Royal Navy’s roots in Tudor England, that’s a lot of trees over the centuries – some say all that cutting changed the nature of the countryside from heavily-wooded to the more open landscape you see  there today. Luckily for New South Wales, our requirements are going to be a tad more modest.

And one thing’s for sure – while interesting, the creation of ‘kindling knees’ for our heating purposes isn’t an exercise we need to repeat. Let’s move on to structures requiring less time swinging a hatchet — my own aching knees would be thankful.