I am about to put on my 6th layer.  I am absolutely, totally Freezing (note the capital F).  It is 11am on Wednesday morning, I have only been home for 30 minutes and yet my toes are numb and my fingers are rapidly starting to seize up (so whether I finish this post in one sitting is debatable).  Even my bum cheeks are chilled.

I fear that if I remain in this position, I will have hypothermia before the end of the day.

I am wondering if it would be a good idea to run up and down the stairs a dozen times, get the blood circulating.  But am I cold enough to warrant doing exercise?  hmmm.  I might leave it a bit longer…

I am now debating whether to shift my freezing butt up the stairs to work under the duvet, but this would be at the sacrifice of the wifi connection…

I am now considering a move into the warmest room of the house.  I am currently sat in the study, which is not the warmest room of the house, it is the second warmest room of the house.  The accolade of warmest room belongs to the downstairs toilet.  I could balance my computer on the top of the cistern…

Oh by the way, I am not doing some crazy experiment and re-creating medieval times.  I do live in a house with heating.  It just scares me about turning it on during daylight hours.  I mean the cost, not the actual action of turning it on.  I have visions of receiving a bill that we can’t pay because I left the heating on for an extra hour.  Aside from that I don’t actually believe in having the heating on all the time.  It’s like using a disinfectant wipe for the kitchen table.  I mean, the body needs to build up defence mechanisms, we shouldn’t be going around in t-shirts and shorts through the winter.  But.  SIX layers? and I’m still cold?  Worst part of it all?  Steve has just arrived in Portugal which is in a delightful mid-teen situation.

(Really annoying phrase coming up, and I do try not to say it too much, but) ‘when we were in Switzerland’ I was hardly ever cold.  Yes, when it snowed it was chilly and there was a particularly cold period last January which was enough to freeze your brass knockers off.  But.  I could sit in our apartment and look across the Zugersee to the snow clad Alps beyond and just have two layers on, for the whole day!  The apartment was insulated on the outside.  The floors were heated.  The ambient temperature was perfect throughout the cold months and if it got especially chilly we could light the wood burner and we’d be toasty in a matter of minutes.

Here, back in the UK, in the house that I love, we have solid walls and large airy windows.  We have ineffective radiators, positioned under windows so that the heat goes straight into the crisp outside.  We have a piddly wood burner that throws out as much heat as a match.  More than anything though we have wind.  No, not bodily wind (unless you are talking about my son) but Mother Nature, external wind.  It whips across the country from all directions, bringing snow from Siberia and the Arctic.  It turns a beautiful, crisp walk into a bitter ordeal.  Switzerland, or maybe it was just Zug, rarely stirred into anything more than a gentle breeze.  It meant that whilst the ground temperature was cold enough for snow to settle and to stay, the air was warm enough to allow people to function.  We could enjoy the delights of winter without worrying about additional, extortionate, heating bills.  We (well, I) could sit at home and write a blog post without the danger of getting hypothermia.

Talking of which I think I’d better go and run around the house a couple of times…