In a blow targeted straight at the city’s middle-class heart, Sadiq Khan is trying to occasionally ban some wood-burning stoves from being used in London. To reduce air pollution, he is seeking powers to prohibit the burning of wood in any areas that suffer from poor air quality. However, there are 1.5m wood-burning stoves in the UK, and that number is increasing by 200,000 annually. So, if you have a wood-burning stove that you can’t currently use, what are you supposed to do with it? Some thoughts.
• Use it to burn something less harmful to the environment than wood. Polystyrene perhaps?
• Try to shore up your middle-class credentials by exclusively using it to dry quinoa.
• Keep it where it is, in case you need to kick something.
• Stay warm by laughing bitterly at all the articles from a decade ago extolling the ethical virtues of purchasing a wood-burning stove.
• Huddle around your defunct wood-burning stove during the coldest months of winter, and stay warm by thinking about a nice cup of tea.
• Sell it on eBay before the ban kicks in, and spend the money on a 20-year-old diesel car.
• Convince yourself that you can attain an equivalent sense of hygge by making the focal point of your living room a two-bar Argos electric fire.
• Missing all those cosy biomass particles in your house? Simply trade in your wood-burning stove for six tons of fine-grade sawdust.
• Recreate the Scandi-noir look you were going for when you bought the stove by wearing a nice jumper and murdering loads of people.
• Pack up your woodburner and move somewhere with less stringent air pollution laws, such as rural China or Putin’s Russia.
• Use it to store craft beer, or microscooters, or hair gel, or whatever else you idiot members of the metropolitan elite happen to be into this week.
• Keep burning as much wood as possible, while reminding the mayor how disappointed tourists are when they realise London isn’t as shrouded in choking pollution as is it in films.
• Will a defunct wood-burning stove double as an effective, albeit tiny, bunker come the nuclear war? Give it about a fortnight and you can try for yourself.
• Take a selfie reflected in the glass door, and tell people you used a new Instagram filter called Hubris.
• Fill it full of headless dolls, so that people think you’re just dangerous and creepy and not environmentally negligent.
• Fill it with all your hopes and unrealised dreams, and then watch Sadiq Khan ban all of those, too.
