It's getting colder. This morning I upgraded to two t-shirts under my heavy chambray gardening shirt, under my fleece. I switched from the Tilley hat to a fleece beanie a while back, since the intensity has gone out of the sun. Come mid-winter I'll be up to three t-shirts, layered into a composite garment that comes off and goes on as one, and a wind-proof coat that saw the top of Scafell in its better days. With the vest as well that's seven layers, which is getting close to my maximum tog rating. Many more and I'd be stuck bolt upright and unable to bend, like the Michelin man.
The Systems Administrator has just put the central heating on as further proof that winter has now arrived and is open for business. Only one radiator so far, the one in our bedroom, and I expect the evening will be punctuated by odd gurgles and rattles as the summer's accumulation of air works its way round the system. We've lit a small fire in the sitting room grate for the past couple of evenings, but tonight made the strategic decision to withdraw from that end of the house. Instead we'll be firing up the stove in the study. It's all part of the seasonal expansion and contraction in our domestic living space. In the height of summer the high ceilings and broad expanse of the open plan living and dining area is a joy, and the doors are propped open all day as daily life spills out on to the veranda and into the garden. In the depths of winter we retreat to the study, a smaller and more den-like space that we can warm to a reasonable temperature in the course of an evening.
The study holds its heat better than the sitting room, being at the sheltered end of the house with fewer outside walls and backing on to the kitchen where the Aga provides our one source of heat during the day. Also I think the books act as a heat sink, a sort of giant paper stuffed storage heater. It looks warmer as well, because it is painted dark red. The sitting room's off-white walls are intended to reflect the light, and act as a neutral ground to encourage your eye to move on to the view outside. The effect in the summer when the distinction between indoors and outdoors is blurred is very nice, but in the winter the high white walls look chilly, quite apart from the fact that not a single glass ball in the Galilean thermometer on the mantelpiece has descended.
Somebody we know once observed of a mutual friend, that lives in a much larger, grander, colder and even more ramshackle house than ours, that people were silly to live in houses they couldn't afford to heat, but I quite like the seasonal shuffle between the wide open spaces and the dark den. We won't entirely give up the sitting room, heating it up specially when we have guests, and maybe for the odd Saturday night later in the year when we begin to get cabin fever shut in the study, and we'll decamp upstairs for Christmas week and hang the amount of wood we get through. But on the whole I like the seasonal change of scene, much as I like eating English strawberries in summer while giving imported strawberries a miss in winter and switching my allegiance to miniature oranges.
In the meantime I am feeling distinctly chilly. I once heard or read somewhere, and have believed it ever since, that when the weather turns colder it takes the human brain a week to make the necessary metabolic adjustments. Give it another week and my metabolism will be roaring away like a steam train, converting cake into useful body heat.
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