Warmth

I knew that something was up on Sunday morning when I heard Shirley taking her morning shower in our upstairs bathroom. There we just have an electric shower that is fed with cold water. In the downstairs bathroom, the shower  is fed directly from the new "combi" boiler for which we paid a king's ransom last June.

Yes - you have got it. The new boiler  had developed a fault and was no longer working. We checked the manual and in spite of pressing the "reset" button, the boiler soon ground to a halt once more. The digital display was flashing "F29" which meant that we wouldn't be able to fix it ourselves. 

Fortunately, the boiler is under guarantee so on Monday morning a central heating engineer from the company that did the fitting work arrived to assess the problem. He soon decided that it was an issue that needed to be addressed by the boiler manufacturer. 

Another big van arrived this morning from "Vaillant" and within half an hour the problem was fixed. We had central heating and hot water once again. Whaay! Forty eight hours of living in a fridge was over and we could return to normal life.

Both Shirley and I grew up in houses that did not have central heating systems. Our houses were heated by coal fires and electric storage radiators. In wintertime, I often woke up with a freezing nose, reluctant to throw back the cosy bed covers and put my bare feet on the ice cold linoleum in my bedroom. Sometimes there was ice on the inside of our single-glazed bedroom windows. 

At this latitude on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, home heating in wintertime is essential and those cold forty eight hours we have just endured reminded me of how much British people rely on central heating these days. Of course we cannot burn domestic coal any more and in cities wood-burning stoves are greatly discouraged. People are kind of trapped. We have to pay the energy providers.

As I thought about writing this blogpost, I investigated how Arctic peoples kept themselves warm in desperately cold winters. Clothing and footwear were of key importance. Of course they used animal skins including the hides of caribou, seals and polar bears. Their shelters were well-insulated - including igloos built of packed snow. Inside a well-constructed and inhabited igloo, the temperature might rise to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in  the outside air. Coastal Inuit people made oil for cooking and light from seal and whale blubber. They were very resourceful people but their winters must have been very hard  indeed. It is likely that genetically they were better predisposed to coping with very cold weather.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/WFpsbqylr