Note: Apologies for the radio silence but it has been an odd couple of weeks. I have been keeping notes; I just haven’t got around to adding them to the blog. To help me keep track I will be back-dating the posts, so the previous few and next several posts will catch me up to date.
My sister commented that many recent posts have been food-related (no surprise there). Well folks, over the next few weeks I sense that my blog will have (but not be limited to) three key themes: food, UK travel, and the cold. And today, it’s the cold.
My cottage is long and narrow: first the utility room, then the kitchen & dining area, then the open sitting room, then my bedroom, then the front sitting room. The kitchen and the open sitting room (I call it the sunroom because of the large bay window) are the only two rooms with forced-air heating. They’re also the two rooms I spend most of my time in and they’re both big rooms, so the heating works hard. I have the thermostat set to 25C in each room but they never get warmer than 18C (I bought a thermometer to track my pain) and the kitchen usually doesn’t even get that warm. I have a couple of space heaters (the locals keep asking me what I mean by that term – they call them room heaters, or electric heaters, or radiant heaters), which I use intermittently to boost the temperature in the sunroom and my bedroom.
The latter is an important point: there is no heat in my bedroom. Nope, none. It can drop to 12C throughout the day; I turn on the little space heater at around 8 p.m. to give the room three hours to heat up before bed, but I won’t sleep with one of those things on, so it’s back down to 12C by the time I get up.
There’s no heat in the bathroom; I leave the towel rail heater on in the daytime to bring the temperature up to about 17C. But I don’t put a towel on the railing – oh no, that would defeat the whole point of using the rail to warm the room.
My landlord and several other acquaintances who are familiar with the house ask me why I don’t just use the small, lower-ceilinged front room all the time and keep its door closed? It too does not have forced-air heating, but the little electric heater would heat it up in no time, and make it very snug. Well, yes, but it’s dark and pokey with small windows and a leather sofa. (I don’t know why, but I have something against leather sofas. Don’t ask, it beats me.) And while moving in there would be warmer when I’m sitting reading, the rest of the house would still be an igloo. Cooking, cleaning, moving around, showering, laundry, all done in the cold.
I may have mentioned the temperature once too often to my landlord. He had arranged for insulation to be installed, but his contractor has been hospitalized with a serious illness, which is hardly his fault. And it’s been a cold autumn this year (again, not the landlord’s fault). And heating prices are through the roof in the UK (definitely not his fault). So, I will stop complaining to him – although, every time we chat, he does ask – and if he asks, I’m gonna tell him – he really needs to stop asking, “So, is the house still cold?” Of course it’s still cold – what’s changed since our last conversation?
Anyhoo – enough of a rant for today. This was just to set the stage for future posts about new morning routines, UK heating costs, slow cookers, and a whole new in-home, hygge-centred wardrobe.