Wood

My message to the log police

Here, as in Britain, everyone is a log expert. The woodman leaves a heap at the bottom of the drive and almost everyone subsequently walking past it stops to tell you’ve been conned, that that’s never a stère, it’s half more like. (A measure of logged wood in France was set in 1793 at one cubic metre and is called a stère. It’s about 12 wheelbarrow loads.) The woodman fastened his nose on my Barbour and inhaled fanatically. ‘Barbour,’ he said. ‘Oh-la-la-la-la’ How much did you pay for that, they say? So you tell them and they laugh in your face at your inadmissible complacency. High-ranking log police might then