Two weeks on, and it still feels like the arctic!

I have to say that I am now well and truly sick of being cold and more often than not, also wet.

Living in one of the highest and one of the few steep, north facing parts of Surrey, the ice and snow hang around here longer than anywhere else and when they fall, do so with a vengeance and we get far more than anyone else locally. I have resorted to taking photos of the garden marked with the date and time and sending them in to work when I can’t get out of the road with the car, as they don’t believe me. For instance as of now, everywhere else the white stuff has disappeared, but not here! Oh no, it is lurking in corners and on the flower beds looking like it will be there until July. There remains a reasonable sized bank of it nestled up against the side of the greenhouse which is frozen solid.

The forecast for the Easter weekend, which being at the beginning of April we might have had not unreasonable hopes of being spring like and warmish, looks dire. Top temperatures of four degrees all weekend, significantly lower than average, with drifting fronts of rain and sleet criss-crossing the country. We might avoid those in the south east, but with what can only be described as a needling, bitter wind still in evidence it still looks as though we have become a far flung outpost of the arctic.

“Don’t be such a wimp” I hear some of you cry! “You can dress for the cold and when you get out and do a bit of exercise you get so warm!” Maybe, and if that’s what you want to do then bully for you, but personally I can do without weather which means it takes about ten minutes to get ready to go out of the front door due to the amount of clothing and thermal protection you have to put on. To walk the dog, I am wearing leggings with jeans over the top, a T-shirt, then a long sleeved shirt, then a thick jumper, then a Barbour. I have a thick scarf which is wrapped round my neck about three times, a woolly hat which makes me look as though I am going to a fancy dress party as an elf, two pairs of sock, wellies and leather gloves. Quite frankly, I look ludicrous and am a fair impersonation of the Michelin Man, being practically circular once everything is on.

There would appear to be no let up in this abysmal weather for the foreseeable future, quite possibly through to the middle of April. It will really piss me off if the moment I go away for my holidays in the second week of April the weather breaks and the UK gets sunshine and mid teens temperatures. I remember two years ago going to Greece with two friends mid April when the weather here had been awful and saying “It’s lovely in Crete in April, temperatures mid twenties and we’ll be on the beach”. The minute we left, temperatures in the UK became tropical and the whole week that we were away, it was 27 degrees here but tipped it down in Greece and was cold. It didn’t ruin the holiday, but it didn’t help after I’d bigged it up so much.

I dread to think how much money we will owe the gas board by the time (if ever) we get to switch the heating off. Four days a week (the weekend and the two days I work at home) the boiler is going for about 16 hours, virtually all day. This is a naturally cold house due to the two open chimneys, an unheated kitchen (the radiator is behind an extra cupboard we installed as I have so many pots and pans, and so we switched it off) and the fact that the French windows don’t shut properly with a gap at the top you can see daylight through. I keep meaning to get them fixed, but they’re not a security risk as the locking mechanism still works and have simply dropped slightly in the centre away from the frame, so it isn’t really a priority. I’m not even sure if you can get things like that fixed, or if they have to be replaced. That definitely isn’t affordable, although if I offset the gas bills I might manage it.

The best investment I have made in recent weeks was an electric blanket, which I bought through an ebay ‘Deal of the Day’ for about a quarter of its usual price. About an hour before we go to bed one of us goes and switches it on and it’s toastie in the extreme when we eventually slip under the duvet. Lovely, and no need for bedsocks.

Now there’s an image to leave you with!