How to make your candles last longer

Under the sink. That’s where most of us will be keeping a stash of candles in case the lights go out this winter on account of an erratic electricity supply. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself in darkness and not remembering where you’ve left the candles and the matches. Be prepared.

We’ve got out of the habit of using candles except for dinner parties, so we’ve lost touch with our inner chandler. Not many children go to sleep looking at night (tea) lights because they’re afraid of the dark.

So I sought out the founder of Candle Maker Supplies off the Shepherd’s Bush Road in London, David Constable, who remembers the 1970s when blackouts meant everyone using candles. His tip: chill your candles before using them; that way, they last longer. As for the composition of the candle, he says it’s really a choice between paraffin wax (cheap and effective) and beeswax (lovely and long-lasting but at least three times more expensive) or – his preference – a mix of the two, say nine parts paraffin to one part beeswax. But not soya: ‘Soya wax is awful.’ If you’re an eco-vegan, with issues about beeswax and paraffin, your options are less good.

Time was when candles were even more animalic, being usually made from tallow –rendered animal fat – which had the advantage of being cheap and the disadvantage of being smelly. That was displaced in the 19th century with paraffin and spermaceti oil.

In churches, candles must be more than half beeswax – formerly they had to be all beeswax. The wax represents Christ’s flesh; the wick, his soul; the flame, his divinity. In the Middle Ages, according to the medieval historian Eamon Duffy, people would get a wick the length of someone they were praying for and make a whopper candle to burn for them.