Last winter, I went with some friends to stay at a house near a ski resort. A sumptuous place full of posh people. Luckily, we didn’t have to pay to stay there because the house belonged to my partner’s father, whose parents had a lot of money. We had a real blast there, we went skiing during the day, and in the evening we would play board games, make music, or watch movies. One day we went to some natural thermal baths in the mountains. It was very cold outside, so it was wonderful to bathe in hot water. At one point, I was heating up too much and had to move to a cooler pool at the bottom part of the stream. Even though the house had central heating, we did not use it much because we preferred to use the chimney. We would collect firewood during the day to make sure we would have a nice fire to keep us warm in the evening. Sometimes we would use it to heat up water when the furnace wasn’t working. We truly enjoyed cooking sweet potatoes, chestnuts, and artichokes on the fire. Actually, now I remember that my partner’s dad told us we couldn’t use the central heating anyway because it was broken and they had to wait for the HVAC technician to fix it. This didn’t matter for us at all, for I will always remember those cozy evenings reading a book and having a nice cup of hot chocolate by the fire and not for a second being bothered about the central heating being out of order.