GETTING HOT UNDER THE COLLAR

The perpetual debate about heating the house is driving Alan Cochrane to distraction, and he’s finding himself well and truly outnumbered by the ladies of the manor

Living with cauld tatties vexes Alan Cochrane

How to heat a cold house is a perennial problem, the more so if you let it get cold in the first place. Mind you, before I start I must insist that the house in which we live is not by any stretch of the imagination cold.

That view, however, is a strictly minority one because the other inhabitants – three people of a distinctly female persuasion – are forever complaining that they’re freezing. And not just in the winter, either.

It’s a moan that can be heard in these parts during almost every month of the year – except July, and that’s because we’re normally in France for much of it.

Still, I will accept that our mid-Victorian house can be a mite draughty but then that’s what you get when you go for quality and character, is it not? Better a few breezes blowing round the house, surely, than the stuffy atmosphere so prevalent nowadays in those over-insulated dwellings in which many prefer to live. For one thing, it’s much healthier – or at least that’s what I tell the offspring – to stick on another layer if you’re that cold.

And anyway living in the city now is surely preferable, at least to their way of thinking, than in the countryside where they spent much of their younger years. Then, they really did experience cold – lots of snow, especially around New Year, and too many ‘minus’ temperatures to remember in any detail. However, the strange thing is they never seemed to feel the cold. Or if they did, they never mentioned it. Or if they did, I ignored their moans.

Once, we were completely snowed in – for four or five days – and had to dig ourselves out on a number of occasions. We had great difficulty with an extremely large guest one New Year and I have a vague memory of getting everyone to the ‘disco’ on sledges… but surely I couldn’t have got him out that way. Could I? But how else?

Still, I digress. The events I’m talking about here are all, sadly, in the past: what’s required now is maintaining an even temperature at our Edinburgh abode. ‘And can we make that above 30 degrees Celsius,’ I hear them cry. As I’ve never really got the hang of ‘new’ temperatures, I’ve no idea how warm that is, but I know it’s bound to be too hot for me.

Most of the chimneys in our house have long since been blocked up and gas central heating is supposed to do what the many open fires presumably did in days gone by. But, according to my nearest and dearest it simply doesn’t happen – thanks to radiators continually needing ‘bled’ and those in their bedrooms being too far removed from the boiler, they are thus never likely to get really hot.

The upshot throughout much of the house is an assortment of electric things – under-blankets, fan heaters and oil-filled radiators which gobble up, or so the makers claim, very little ‘juice’. Our fuel bills regularly give the lie to that assertion.

Oh yes, there’s a gas heater which used to keep the cottage warm. That is considered too ugly to be used too often in town. But I shall tell you what, it will be pressed into service if this winter stays cold, especially in that ‘sit-oot-erie’ where it’s perpetually cold.

Best of all, I have recently rediscovered an incredibly reliable coal merchant who delivers in the old fashioned way, with men toting huge sacks of smokeless coal down the basement steps and tipping them into our bunker. His prices, too, are significantly less than the outrageous amounts charged by the local garage.

I daresay many of you are not in the slightest surprised by this fact but we townies are frequently taken for suckers. So much so that we’re ever so proud when we find a better way of keeping warm. Well, warm-ish, at any rate.

“Our mid-Victorian house can be a mite draughty, but that’s what you get when you go for character