More than ever in the UK, fuel bills now resemble school fees and so, despite the bitter cold, few of us can afford full-on 24-hour heating. But, driven by desperation, I’ve been researching the matter and have discovered several ways of surviving this miserable weather. Forget about replacement double glazing: it looks nasty and it doesn’t pay for itself until you are over 100. But if you don’t mind living in a house that shrieks ‘credit crunch’ to visitors, there are ways of keeping the cold out and the bills down.
First attend to your windows: attach cling film with double-sided tape (try your local DIY shop) to your window frames. Apply a hair dryer to get it taut as a drum. It lasts one winter. Of course, if you need to escape in the event of a fire you will be broiled alive by yards of burning plastic, but then life isn’t without risks.
Another trick, and a pleasurable job to boot, is to acquire some ‘gift width’ Sellotape and line every window join and tape up any French doors you have. Four reels should seal the average sized house and it’s amazingly effective as a draft stopper. Remember to remove any door keys and cover the holes. Your front-door letterbox is usually a wind-chill spot, so seal it and forget about any post until the spring.
Open fireplaces are a mixed blessing. What fuel to use? House coal is a problem (wholesalers won’t deliver it to smokeless zones so, if you live in town, you are stuck with bags of expensive smokeless nuggets) and thanks to a current global coal shortage it’s a hefty price. If you have a large-ish fireplace, wood is the answer. Sawing up logs is a great way to keep warm and a chainsaw is, I think, a vital bit of kit for the chilled householder. Never operate one in poor light or under the influence, however. I went on a chainsaw weekend safety course and you would never believe the number of interesting ways in which you can sever an artery or limb. The key thing they tell you when operating a chainsaw is to have a mobile on you so you can phone for an ambulance — assuming you have any fingers left.
The truth is that burning logs on an open fire in a large room is a dubious activity, thermally speaking. An open fire, when it gets going, is deeply inefficient: it sucks in vast amounts of frigid air from under the doors and up through floorboards, so much so that the room can look warmer while getting colder. What happens in my experience is that your upper half gets warm while an arctic wind whips cruelly up the trousers. (I have heard that Deep Heat or a similar embrocation rubbed on the shins can combat this.)
However, a cheery blaze in the hearth will warm your mind, which is really half the battle. You could try attaching sturdy leather strips to the door jambs to reduce the drafts, but your dog will probably chew them off.
Our teenage sons grump terribly because their rooms are in an unheated attic conversion where the toothpaste is chilled stiff and the windows in the morning are adorned with ice ferns. What with their fondness for cans of bird-pulling Lynx deodorant, their freezing bedrooms currently look and smell like an Inuit brothel. But as I never tire of pointing out, these conditions are actually rather healthy. They never get colds. It also means that they are forced to share their parents’ living space in the evening, forcing the ambient temperature up.
If you have an Aga, be thankful. They are much maligned for their ungreen-ness. But most Agas outside Chelsea work hard for a living. The trick is to make them multi-task. Our ancient Esse (a vintage Aga-like machine built before the war in Bonnybridge) has been a feature of our kitchen for decades and it consumes only coal and is unconvertible. The black stuff used to come from South Wales, about 30 miles away. These days it comes from northern China, where the working conditions are appalling. The cooker gets through a tonne of anthracite a year, which means my coal shed is littered, morally speaking, with dead Chinese miners. The only salve to the conscience is to make the most of every precious nugget. We take it turns to sit on the stove, which apart from warming one’s organs also does all the cooking (except at dinner parties when our cast-iron friend invariably turns into a sulky bastard and goes out), the ironing and towel drying. It also parboils unseasoned logs, upping their calorific value on the fire.
Eating fat is a good tactic in this weather. Lard intake should be hefty, as it insulates the body against cold. Thanks to the grim realities of modern meat production, supermarket pork today tastes like fish. Better to get a free-range fat pig and put it in your freezer. My current supplier, the food guru William Kendall, sells me bits of his sensational rare-breed pigs which are fatter pound for pound than grey seals. Just one rasher of the bacon produces about an inch of lard in the pan in which frying eggs flop violently, sending up great mists of scalding fat. The meat, however, is irresistibly delicious and a regular cooked breakfast will soon give you a warming layer of blubber around the midriff. You can bulk this further in the evenings with cheap whisky from Lidl — filthy but half the price of Famous Grouse.
The right clothes in this weather are essential. Resurrect your old string pants if you have any. They work. My wife recommends Damart underwear and cashmere, however moth-eaten. But nothing, I reckon, beats a sturdy pair of Viyella pyjamas. A clever twill of cotton and wool with a tape cord and a gaping fly, these voluminous school jimjams will keep you toasty beneath the skimpiest duvet. I once spent a week in Ulan Bataar in temperatures of minus 30 and I never took my pyjamas off once, layering clothes over my ponging night attire. I even wore them to the unheated state theatre, where I sat through a four-hour sub-zero Mongolian opera. I suffered appallingly — but not from the cold.