Cold

My new lifestyle of doing my new job in Ealing and living in Maidenhead is making me cold. There are various reasons for this.

The biggest irk is that my new flat doesn’t have gas central heating (like my old place and everywhere else I have ever lived) but has night storage heaters. These things are fine for bringing the flat up to temperature in the morning but have to be set on a relatively high output in order to bring the place up to any kind of tolerable morning temperature. I like my flat to be hot in the morning and at the moment it is only adequately warm for my tropical tastes. The problem here is that by using all the ‘stored’ heat up in the morning there is nothing left for the evening so I am presently alternating between being cold and burning cash by switching on the standard electric heater function on the heaters.

Then there is getting to work and being at work. I walk to the station and wait on a windy platform, board a generally pleasantly temperate train before walking at the other end to work and vice versa in the evening. At work I have cause to be out of the office more and this is predominantly on foot. When it comes to shopping I am doing this too on foot either on the way home from work or by walking into Maidenhead town centre at the weekend. As a consequence of all this I am spending a lot more time in the harsh outside. I do have layers so my main body, feet and neck are always pretty warm but I don’t have gloves (do guys even wear gloves these days?) and my work trousers are not particularly thick meaning I have cold hands, knees and nose for large chunks of the day.

I don’t like being cold and I now seem to have a permanently runny nose and variably pink slash purple, cracked hands. None of this makes me particularly happy especially coming home in the evening to a cold flat. I am going to address the flat thing this weekend by buying a timeable free standing oil radiator which should overcome my biggest complaint about the flat being cold (subject to making sure that kind of behavious isn’t a fire hazard).

Meanwhile all I can do is wait for spring and summer to bring some milder weather and try not think about next winter for the time being.