Opening Lines: Hoarding firewood salvaged from a skip is as survivalist as I get

It leans outside against the wall of the back yard: the product of instinct, opportunism and about an hour’s proper physical labour.

It’s timber for the fire that I scavenged. Now, I wasn’t out in the forest dressed in furs, armed with a mattock, wolves stalking me while in the dark groves, sinister pagan idols smiled at me grotesquely. I just happened to be cycling,  passed a neighbour’s house, saw they were renovating, knocked at the door and asked if I could take their wood. Still, there’s something satisfyingly primal and instinctive about getting fuel from the land.

And there is a sense of history in handling the discarded timbers from an old house. What stories are wrapped up in these structural elements. Who walked across these joists on their way to comfort a sleeping child when they woke from a nightmare? Who leant against this door-frame as they delivered some troubling news to the person in the room? Who cares? I’m creating some new memories of cosy fires as the wood gets consumed in the ever-voracious stove.

I’m not saying that having a fire means you automatically acquire an obsession for fuel. All I’m saying is that when the nights draw in and the shade gets chilly, I start seeing firing everywhere. One man’s skip is another man’s opportunity to climb over hazardous waste to retrieve a broken table while nearly severing an artery on window glass, as the old saying goes. The sharp timber hunger has abated for a while. I’m like one of those snakes that has eaten a warthog and is ‘grand for the time being’ . But the fire is blazing and I’ll be on the hunt again. I won’t be the only one. There are Young Lads around, also scavenging wood for Halloween bonfires - the Pallet-ive care units.

I relish the competition. In this modern pampered existence there isn’t much a man can do to feel like he has any kind of survival instinct. Going out and finding timber is one of those ways. I need something. According to an online calculator about How Long You Would Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, if civilisation collapsed today, I’d be devoured sometime on Friday afternoon.

The instinct to hoard must be in part due to the time of year. You get carried away. There is such a sense of harvest. The colour orange is everywhere. We bought a pumpkin in Lidl. It was so big that I imagined afterwards the Lidl Regional manager expressing astonishment that it was gone. “You sold ‘Die Orangenkaiser’? How is this possible?”

Pumpkins of that size are not just for lunch though and now the freezer is full of containers of pumpkin soup. There’s so much there that if we defrosted it all at once we’d distort the soup market.

As for the timber, it’ll keep but I have to saw it. By hand. And the first stroke of the saw has hit a nail – a relic of the history of the wood I so blithely dismissed - and taken the edge off the saw. Sometimes instinct needs to slow down and be a bit more careful.

Colm O’Regan’s third book It’s Earlier Tis Getting, the Christmas Book of Irish Mammies is published on Thursday.