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[ 6 minute read ]

My heating and I fight

Around this time of year, my heating and I usually wrestle in the mornings. It used to be good-natured; ‘You are too hot!’, ‘No, you are!’ This might go on for a while, bickering, until one of us, most often me, gets a bit physical. You have heard of ‘a wall of heat’ haven’t you? I have ultimate control; of course, I control how much food the heating gets with a little switch, but I am loathe to use it because I know the heating wants me to use it just to make me look stupid when I point a finger at it and moan. Eventually, I remember, or discover a day or so later, that ‘someone’ has switched the heating off.

       ‘You wasted your time scolding me, you know? I couldn’t hear you.’

       ‘How do you know I was scolding you?’

       ‘You did. You probably raised you voice a bit as well. “What is wrong with you?” Isn’t that what you say?’’

I don’t like denying food to all the heating but sometimes it all gets a bit much for me. You see, I am outnumbered. I have A LOT of radiators; more than five! Some of them are really quite benevolent and just quietly welcome me when I come in. The one by the front door is like a cat weaving between my legs. It is the leader, the big one, in the living room, that tries to dominate me. 

It is monstrously expensive to try to heat rooms and store heat simultaneously, with storage heating; imagine trying to heat water in your immersion heater while you have all the hot taps on and you will get the picture. The big radiator, in the living room is a seven kiloWatt device; the same as an immersion heater. 

First thing in the morning, in my living-room, the temperature is 25^oC / 77 ^oF and only 19^oC / 66^oF in the bedroom and hall. I open the living room door from the hall and, Wall of Heat! Don’t ask, it is just more efficient to not let the airs mingle too much. (I keep a spreadsheet of power consumption). So, when I started writing this I had to be wearing only trousers. In five minutes, I shall need to start getting fully dressed again. The reason for this is that each of the radiators has a fan on a timer. It is just so annoying. I am not very organised and even have to go outside for a minute or two in the mornings ( 1^oC / 33 ^oF today). I put clothes on, and then take them off, and then put some back on, and then more, and then strip back to only trousers.

I used to own a logistics business, concentrating on transport. I started out as a home and business relocation service provider; but because I don’t eat bacon sandwiches I was not a man with a van. I went into road haulage and heavy haulage, and expanded the business across Europe. Once we were established; on occasion, I would personally need to assess the requirements of some clients from within their home; a personal business meeting, if you will. It was that sort of business wherein we needed to understand the client’s ‘needs and wants’ across multi-layered platforms of operation in multiple countries, concurrently. Of course, we were always professional; so why did I sit down uninvited in a client’s home? Worse, I seemed to want to take my shoes off and just chat. Smell. Old wood smoke. It was autumn and they had an open fireplace. The ashes in the fireplace confirmed they had recently had a fire. This isn’t ‘fifty shades’ so there was no rug in front of the fireplace and no pair of wineglasses left on the coffee table, just five well-groomed adults standing before me in a sparse but expensively decorated room, giving each other puzzled glances. Fortunately, my shoes were still on my feet when I shook off my intoxication and threw off being a hostage to sensuality.

I grew up in a bungalow with an outside toilet. There were two fireplaces, one in the living room (lit) and one in my bedroom (never lit); and a wood-burning range, maybe an Aga, in the kitchen. Mostly, we burned coal in those days, but often, in the earliest days, wood. The wood-burning kitchen range / stove only ever burned wood and was only lit to heat the kitchen before we went to school; we had electric. At home, there were draughts in every room and in the coldest months, we would burn one side of ourselves by the living room fire while our other side was cold, so we would swap places to ‘burn’ the other side for a while. Outside, I learned to ‘go’ really quickly. One day I timed it, from the back door and back in thirty seconds. Run, trousers down, ‘go’, wipe, trousers up, flush, run. I even had to pass the Belgian Hare and the guinea-pig cages, there and back. It is not hardship if you know no different. Visitors to my home sometimes ask, ‘No shower?’

       ‘Did you see the bucket in the bath, and the jug?’

       ‘Yes’

       ‘I boil a kettle and use that.’

They have nothing to say to that.

No-one ever mentions that my bathroom is not heated. There was no fireplace in the bathroom of the bungalow I grew up in. It is also no wonder, to me, that I have never got into the habit of reading newspapers or magazines.

In Winter, the warmth from the kitchen range used to be the first thing I was conscious of while my mum was gently forcing my arms into my school clothes. Somehow, I went to sleep in my bedroom before she had finished reading Enid Blyton aloud, and ‘woke up’ in the kitchen, being manipulated into shapes to fit into the arm and leg holes of my clothes. I was never conscious of a burning wood smell but it was there. I love Winter.

       'Mr Kawazuki, my apologies! Mr Ango! Small nods and bows to the others. In return, I got relieved smiles.

While there is a wall of defiant heat when I go from one room to another in my modern home first thing in the morning; and a damp dish-cloth of cold outside these days. The smell of wood-smoke combined with the scent of cold on my clothes is a trigger for me to become limp for a while in a snug and stupefying nest of peace. I want to burn myself on one side while the other side is cold; and smell wood-smoke. My heating has automatically gone off and I am now fully dressed. The temperature is 21^oC / 69.8 ^oF.