Soba bad soba good

I have a love-hate relationship with our ‘soba’. A soba is a Turkish wood-burning stove and there ours sits, in the middle of the living room, like a small brown alien creature, joined by its tail of intricate pipe-work to our ancient chimney. By day it sleeps. At night it stirs, rumbling and spluttering and, when aroused, belching clouds of noxious smoke towards the ceiling.

I come from a land of central heating. Clean, quiet, effective. In fact, our house has central heating but it runs on diesel and the yearly cost would probably keep a small Turkish village alight. So it only gets turned on for high days and holidays and instead we rely on our decrepit wood-burner to keep the winter chill away.

Good things about having a soba…

It’s cheap. It certainly keeps you fit, all that lugging coal and chopping wood and struggling to the bin with a bucket of not-quite-cool ashes. It’s nostalgic, stirring up memories of childhood when the coalman was a regular visitor to the house and we’d toast slices of Mother’s Pride over the embers during Songs of Praise. It’s a great rubbish bin. And it’s handy for drying laundry – I even have a contraption which straps around the pipes from which undies can be hung though I’d advise against subjecting nylon to this drying method. One whoosh and it melts!

You can heat your tea on a soba and roast chestnuts on the lid (do pierce them first or once they heat up you’ll be dodging the projectiles as if you’re in the Gaza Strip). A friend has a soba which thinks it’s an Aga with drawers and an oven thingy and she says you can cook a three-course meal in it – soup on top, then a casserole and even cake for afters. I’ve never eaten at her house but it’d be an interesting challenge on Masterchef!

Bad things about having a soba…

They stink! No matter how often you throw open the windows on sunny days and change the throws on your sofas, you can never get rid of the smell of coal and you learn the true meaning of spring-cleaning. Sobas are great for heating up a room but I do mean a room and the trip from the subtropical living room to the Arctic wastes of the bathroom takes a great deal of fortitude. No wonder Turks keep suffering from grip (trs: somewhere between a cold and the flu).

A soba is an ugly beast. When the buyers on property shows like Escape to the Country coo, “Oh how lovely, a wood burner” they are usually looking at something attractive, made of cast iron with a little glass window (and lots of radiators nearby). But a Turkish soba is like one of Henry Ford’s early cars. You can have any colour you like, as long as it’s brown! Why not pink? Or orange? Let’s get Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen onto this and design a soba that looks as good as it heats…

At the same time, maybe he could advise on how you design your living space around an ugly, brown, smoke-puffing stove. I’ve tried putting it in the corner out of the way but that meant we all had to sit in the same corner just to stay warm. Now it has pride of place in the centre of the room, the furniture just far enough away not to singe and the TV visible from at least one sofa. But as an interior design statement it doesn’t quite have the same feel-good effect as a lovely big open fire.

And a fire was never quite so bad tempered. Our soba lights when it wants to. I feed it coal, and strips of wood, maybe some newspaper and then if it’s in a good mood it bursts into radiant warmth in seconds. But if it’s the wrong time of the month I can spend an hour tempting it with egg boxes and cornflake packets and slivers of ‘magic wood’ as it sulks and simmers and then, when I lift the lid in exasperation to poke into its murky bowels I’m either rewarded with lungfuls of acrid smoke or whoosh there go the eyebrows!

Still, there’s always the electric blanket...