Wednesday 7 December 2022
I’ve lost the will where the fire is concerned. But, in short, and not entirely an incompetence issue, it stopped transforming the radiators from ice cold to tepid early evening yesterday. It’s not broken per se, and neither are we yet. Actually, we’re doing pretty well in the circumstances, cold circumstances. We have both fully embraced thermals and blankets and have been fine at night with our multiple layers. What doesn’t break you makes you stronger, right? That’s our current mantra and perhaps a better title for this blog. Is the grass greener? From my perspective right now, no. It’s just colder. A lot colder.
It’s 07:42 and I’ve been up for an hour. In that time, I have dealt with the fire (ongoing issue), cleaned my hands many times, spoken on the phone to a delivery man with a microwave for us (it’s zero degrees, very frosty and sunrise here is at around 08:15; he should arrive around 08:00), made a mug of tea that I managed to keep hot (by drinking it about a minute after making it; things get cold very quickly when it’s this cold in the house) and I’ve been outside, which isn’t as frosty or icy as I expected.
The plumbers arrived late afternoon to look at the shower leak through the kitchen light. The problem was, fortunately, straightforward (an inadequately-sized waste-flow pipe that had finally come loose – the kind of fault that is annoying for not being necessary, ie why wasn’t the right size fitted in the first place), but we are now left with a large L-shaped hole in the kitchen ceiling and a missing ceiling light. To fix that, it would seem that we need an electrician and a plasterer. We haven’t had the plumbing bill yet but we know there is a call-out charge (though isn’t that just going to work?) and fuel (which to and from us amounts to at least forty miles’ worth). We have been trying to think of other things we might want/need an electrician or plasterer to do while they’re here to make the cost per minute a little less shocking.
Yesterday, we had a satisfying walk out the back of the garden and up into the forest. It was sunny and the kind of cold we now have appropriate foot/head/hand/body layers for. We may need some additional layers past about minus five. We’ve done okay at minus three. It’s a whole new level of challenge, the coldness and keeping us and the house warm. I can’t imagine London has been much below zero when I’ve lived there and needed to go out. I’ve managed, knowingly, to minus eleven in Finnish Lapland (with a colder windchill factor), but that was with all my thermals and outdoor clothes and a borrowed super-thermal onesie over all that. Snug in the extreme. I couldn’t really move, but, phew, I was never cold beneath my layers. My nose and eyes were another matter.
Even though our shower now apparently works, I had another outdoor shower. The full moon is overnight tonight but last night the sky was clear again and the moon lit the way to the shower. It really was a treat to be outside under a pretty much full moon and stars and having a – well, that was a bit of an issue, the water hadn’t got hot, it was merely warm. Definitely less dreamy than my hot shower from the night before. But still worth the pre-shower coldness and dithering.
It’s now 08:47. The delivery men arrived pretty much exactly when they said. They had been on the road since they left their depot in Leicester and were heading to Glasgow, across to Ayr and staying in a B&B overnight to continue their deliveries tomorrow. The man I spoke to warned about the icy roads (we’ve actually just seen a gritter go past), saying it was forecast for minus six tonight – er, that’s below my estimated thermals-efficacy level – but they cheerily set off. I walked up to the top of our garden, crunching through frosty grass. When I got to the top, I looked out across the road in the distance and alongside the fast-flowing river, through trees and hills on a beautiful frosty morning with the sun coming up, I saw their delivery van driving off. I had a flash of feeling like someone who had just had a delivery of essential supplies, having been isolated for ages. That is not at all the case and not at all how I usually feel, but as I watched their van disappearing round bends and hills, I felt the happiness at their having been here and the happiness of their having left. A comfortable silence was all around and I felt amazing, standing on our hill looking down on our house and the hills and trees all around us. Dare I say it, the heating situation will have to get a lot worse for me to question our moving out here.
Meanwhile, Chris went outside in his Rapanui towelling hoodie to experience the outdoor shower. Scuppered, the pipes were frozen, so no water. He’s just used the repaired indoor shower and it ran fine. I have a suspicion, going by how brief a shower it was, the water wasn’t much more appealing than merely warm.
Today, I will chase again for one of our furniture deliveries, the one with my desk, do some writing, sort another area, set up the convection oven (it has a butter softening setting. Never, ever did I think that would be a feature to aspire to) and add more to Chris’s shopping list as he’s heading to Hawick in a couple of hours to have winter tyres fitted on his car. Definitely feeling we are not in London, which is neither good nor bad; a morning that couldn’t be much different to how a morning in London would have been.