Back in the day we had no need of central bleating

“WE’RE freezing in our homes,” exclaimed a Mirror headline a few days ago.

And it’s just got personal. Our gas boiler has expired. It has turned up its pipes and gone to join the celestial scrapheap.

This is a present-day householder’s worst nightmare: the central heating system collapses in the middle of a northern winter.

The plumber says it will cost many hundreds of pounds to repair, and it’s not worth it. We’re looking at thousands for a replacement. Naturally, Sod’s Law requires that it should happen when it’s most needed.

But I think back to growing up in the 1950s and 60s, when nobody – well, nobody I knew – had central heating. We had a fire in the kitchen, heating a backboiler, and a fire in the front room (but only at Christmas).

Nobody complained about the cold then, because nobody knew any better. There were magical patterns of ice inside the windows, and the outside toilet froze.

You walked to school, and if that didn’t get your circulation going, you sat on the heating pipes in your short trousers and burned your legs.

Despite global warming and all that, with mild, wet winters, we seem to have become a nation of softies, incapable of coping with the seasons.

I’m writing this in an unheated upstairs office at home. Mrs R has provided me with an electric heater, but I haven’t put it on. Another sign of my bringing-up: economising.

Mrs R says we have to have a plan to get our heating back, even if it means buying a new boiler. Since we have a combined age of 158, I suppose she’s right.

But can I buy this on the never-never?