The lure of homemade candle light

FOR ALMOST a decade I lived with moonlight, starlight, firelight and lanterns: kerosene lanterns, then pump up kero ones, then gas lanterns that finally were retired when we bought our first solar panels and electric light.

But kero and gas cost money, and smelled. Candles were free, if you kept bees, as we did then, or ate meat and saved the fat to boil and let harden on top of the water for clean ‘dripping’.

Candle making is easy. Making wicks is not – or rather, unless it’s well made a homemade wick needs to be ‘trimmed’ often to keep it burning, a phrase you often find in old novels.

The simplest light of all is a ‘slushy lamp’. An emergency slushy can be as simple as plaited