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I'm at home.
I'm cold.
The central heating is not coming up to temperature and my plumber, who installed it, is in London and won't be back in the Midlands for several days. I've got a jumper and fleece on and and am thinking of getting the ice scaper from the car to scrape the monitor screen.

I've more coffee this morning than is probably medically wise and have exhausted the excitment of holding my hands near a warm toaster when making some lunch.

But when I mentioned this to my Dad on the phone this morning he seemed bemused. 'Don't you remember going swimming in the sea on Boxing Day when you were young?' We lived in Pembrokeshire, it must have been the Gulf Stream, or perhaps my Dad just threw me in. And then we had the conversation of 'remember in Winter it was so cold that';
1. There was ice on the inside of the windows in the morning.
2. You had to break the ice in the outside loo (we didn't have an inside loo in one house) before you could use it or else disaster.
3. You got dressed whilst still in bed.
4. When you got into bed you assumed the smallest possible foetal position and then, as you finally warmed up, gradually started to spread out.
5. There were 25 blankets on the bed that were so heavy you could barely move and an eiderdown covered in a shiny material that immediately slipped off the bed and onto the floor rendering it's use futile.
6. Each school room had one centrally positioned coal fired cast iron stove - your face and front became so hot spontaneous combustion was a possibility and your backside froze.
7. The ink in the ink-wells was often frozen in the morning.

'And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.'

Anybody else got any 'I was so cold that...' memories?

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Frozen school milk bottles.
The media not making such a fuss because it's cold in winter.

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I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.
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l l

As a child, I lived in a big three-storey Victorian pile. The only heating came from gas fires or those small three-bar electric heaters. I remember freezing cold bathrooms with tepid water, us children huddling around the gas fire in the kitchen, hot water bottles at night - not for us the expensive luxury of electric blankets. It was to be many years before my father finally installed fairly primative central heating. Ironically, my first flat never had central heating nor did my present home when I went to see it.

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Ice on the bedroom windows in the morning.
Seeing your breath when lying in bed.
Leaving the freezer open because it was colder in the outhouse than inside the freezer.
Freezing cold lino on my bedroom floor as we couldn't afford a carpet.
Running the hot water tap for 10 minutes before getting a stream of luke-warm water.
Fighting with my sisters over whose turn it was to have the hot water bottle.
Nicking the hot water bottle out of my sisters beds when they weren't looking.

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I'm never wrong, I'm just less right on occasions.

I certainly remember icicles on the inside of my bedroom windows when I was a small child. And the school milk always being too frozen to drink - though I always hated school milk anyway so I didn't mind. It was either a block of ice in winter, or warm and going off in summer.

And when I first moved up to Manchester and was in digs with a landlady for a while, no central heating, I used to get undressed by the coal fire, throw on a dressing gown and race upstairs into bed before my toes got frostbite. Then in the morning trying to get dressed under the bedclothes.

I had a room in the loft of the halls of residence at University. One winter the snow blew in through the wooden slatting of the dormer window and settled on my bed, while I was asleep.

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My dad told me of a house in the village where he grew up (in the 1940's), where the people were away for a week and the pipes burst and flooded the house. As it was such a hard winter, the water (about 3ft high) eventually froze. So the occupants returned to open the front door and have the whole ground floor as massive block of ice.

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My Gran's house never had central heating at all and she lived there until 2002. Just a gas fire in the living room. In winter as she got older she used an electric fire in the bedroom sometimes and an electric wall heater in the bathroom. But before that, just an open coal fire. She lived like that quite happily until she moved into a care home - and complained it was too hot there!

I remember it being so cold there was ice on the inside of the windows, right across the panes so they made rather nice patterns where the ice had grown. We had a house that had oil powered central heating but when the 1973 oil crisis increased the price of oil and oil products by about 400% my parents who were on a fixed income couldn't pay for the fuel so we had one parafin heater in the kitchen (where we ate) and one in the living room (where the TV was). Hot water was a luxury as it was powered by electricity and that also cost a bomb due to the Arab oil crisis. Mostly I had to boil a kettle of water and add some cold out of the tap and use that.

Upstairs it was so cold that going to bed you put on more clothes than you wore in the daytime - more socks, long johns under pyjamas, lots of jumpers, one hot water bottle, we couldn't afford Eiderdowns but had one of those nylon bed coveralls from Brentford Nylons that looked nice, cost nothing, but had no insulating properties whatsoever. I used to add layers of newspaper in between the 12 blankets, many of which didn't quite fit the bed so well and let draughts in, and a woolly balaclava for my head. With all that on I could just about sleep, but not terribly well.

One day my Dad had a bad asthma attack and we had to get the ambulance to take him to hospital. All routes from our house (in Wales) went uphill, and the ambulance couldn't get out again so we had to get the farmer with his tractor to pull the ambulance out so my Dad could get to hospital.

I love all the stories about cold lino and scuttling upstairs with a dressing gown on as that would have represented a tropical glasshouse to us! If it was warm enough for bare feet and wear a dressing gown for we'd have been quite content! lol!

IMO there's only one thing worse than being cold, and that's being cold and poor. At least I got free school dinners and a free University education.

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It's something about Wales isn't it? My wife's parents lived in a house literally in the middle of a field on the side of a hill. Running water was from a well, frozen in deep winter, and warmth from two coal fires and a coal Rayburn. They were well hard though. They had a small window open in their bedroom throughout the year, switched on the electric blankets only if it got really cold (-5C) and would turn on the storage heaters only if my wife and I came to stay. As the house was totally without any insulation in the walls or roof voids they might of well have put the storage heaters outside for all the difference they made. At least the sheep might have appreciated it. When they used to come and stay with us they would open the window in their bedroom thus letting all the warm air from the central heating back out.

But a more idyllic location for the rest of the year you'd be hard pushed to find.

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Sorry mate, don't believe you at all.








Only joking... Owww!

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