Today I lit the first fire of the coming winter, and it's hard to describe the pleasurable psychological shift it's induced.

I don't have central heating, and my cottage has no insulation: not in the walls or the roof. I don't have a waterproof membrane under the tiles either, only reeds, and no proper drainage. My relationship with the weather is MUCH closer than it was when I lived in a city flat.

In the winter months, the woodburner is a big deal. You've heard the expression 'the heart of the home'? You haven't understood it until you've lived in a cold cottage where you NEED it to stay warm (not just for hygge).

You get good at lighting fires, and watching them closely, and tending them. You learn to split wood. You get so you can pick up a log and know the moisture content. It matters, and not just for show when people come over.

All winter it's a big part of your life. And then the weather warms and you stop needing fires. And you think it'll be weird, except at that exact point the garden comes to life, and your focus switches to the outdoors.

And then the outdoors slows, and you start to have chilly days, but you're still hanging on to summer in your head. Until... until... suddenly, you're not. It's time to light the fire. And so you do.

And at that moment, the 'winter world' rushes back. Instead of the grate, or the woodburner, sitting dead and cold and cobwebbed, it's the central thing again. It lights and warms the rooms and you realise you need to focus on it and care for it again.

The FEELING of winter comes back. The sense of closeness and quietness and indoorsness. Shutting the doors and windows against outside, instead of welcoming it in. It's hard to explain and I didn't have it before I lived here. Winter and summer were different, but not like this.

A fire's been lit in my inglenook for 319 years. Imagine how many people have crouched on the old brick floor where I crouch, laying the kindling, striking a flame. In summer, too, for cooking; for heating water for washing and bathing; for everything.

It's like something clicks back and the cottage remembers what it's for – and so do I. And so begins the months in which there'll be a fire, and me just the latest in a long line of women and men to light it. What a wonderful thing.