FOUR of us walked into a mansion-turned-museum last weekend and headed straight for a feature which wasn't in the guide book at all - the huge fire burning in the entrance hall.

The mansion's original family had been coal-owners - not surprising, given that we were in South Yorkshire - and that no doubt accounted for the large, hang economy-size fireplaces everywhere. Ironically, the blazing fire at which we were warming our hands was of large logs. So was the blaze in the high basket grate in the stable-turned-tearoom, in whose cheerful warmth we threw healthy eating to the bitter wind in the face of huge slabs of home-made cake.

Whoever coined the advertising slogan about a "living fire" had the hammer aimed dead-centre on the nailhead. It flares, it crackles, it shifts, it changes colour and it needs careful tending; in short, it lives.

Most of you reading this will live in villages and small towns where smoke control is unknown and log and coal fires are part of everyday life. "What's she banging on about?" I can hear you mutter.

Well, to those of us in towns which contributed so much to smog, that genuinely lethal Fifties' combination of smoke and fog, real fires are almost a novelty. I'm not knocking smoke control; I saw the difference it made not only to smog but to a garden in an industrial suburb which went from soot-bedraggled to a replica of the owner's garden at her previous home in the Lincolnshire countryside.

The attraction of "proper" fires to the smokeless zoners is apparent in the number of electric and gas appliances which mimic them, from the early, fools no-one, electric "flicker disc" to modern gas fires which come with a chart showing exactly where each mock coal must be placed. I'm not knocking those either; we have a gas fire which replicates the hooded grate our Twenties semi had when it was built and it also hides the central heating boiler. Ah! The boiler. When I get over-sentimental about real fires, I remember that one fire in the living room and the near-arctic chill of the rest of the house. And I'm so grateful.

Christmas is, however, the one season for a bit of sentiment so, come Christmas Eve, we'll chop the kindling, twist up the newspapers and pile on some of those regular-shaped pieces of solid fuel which bear as much relation to a lump of coal as fish fingers do to cod fillet.

When our area went smokeless, we kept one open fireplace as I felt smoke control would be the first regulation to be suspended in any emergency. A refuse collectors' strike shortly afterwards proved me right.

So, every Christmas, we banish the stand-in electric fire to the spare room, and indulge ourselves. We can't be the only ones; almost every petrol filling station sells smokeless fuel too, in bags whose cost per hundredweight I daren't calculate - but it is Christmas.

A very happy, cosy and peaceful Christmas to you all.