COMPETITION OF THE COLDEST
This winter has somehow made freezing fashionable!
Appreciate life can feel a bit like a prize fight some days but the latest area of competition has left me chilled. Literally. Because competitive cold is now a thing. Really. Look, I wish I made this stuff up every week just to keep myself amused but not even a deluded old bat like me could come up with half of it.
Seriously, forget about keeping up with the Joneses; it’s now keeping up with the Inuits. And preferably going one better than living in an igloo.
This isn’t even about the cost of living crisis where there are those genuinely in need – often the elderly – who are too terrified to turn the heating on.
Because, weirdly, the fact that there are those who need to sit wrapped in a blanket in their own homes has been hijacked by those who have turned it into a sport.
They can afford to turn their heating on but appear to think it’s some kind of virtue to be continually colder than you. It makes them a better person.
Well, as a kid who grew up with ice on the inside of the windows and a single coal fire can testify, it just makes you a bit bonkers.
By all means try to save energy but constantly crowing about it like you’re the best thing since sliced bread (not toasted obvs because that would be hot) is making a mockery of those who would kill for your Aga and cashmere.
Not just indoor that they’re at it either. Wild swimming has been with us for a while now (we used to call it just swimming in the sea but we are where we are) but even this has been cranked up.
If the competitive cold weirdos don’t have to physically hack through ice to get into the water for a dip it’s not worth doing.
The water temperature of their local open air lido is boasted about in smug ‘harder than you’ tones.
Freezing has become fashionable. It’s on-trend to boast that a family car journey consists of everyone wearing seven layers. The fact that the windows then fog up with warm breath in the arctic temperature is all part of the ‘fun’. Yay kids, let’s play who can get hypothermia first!’
It’s indoors that these zero temperature zealots really come into their own though. Why ration heating (sensible) when you can create your own Siberian
‘THIS ISN’T EVEN ABOUT THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS’
winter? On your sofa.
The irony of the fact they had to spend so much money on high-end ski and mountaineering wear that they could have paid the heating bills for the entire street for a month is totally lost on them.
And that Government advice to turn the hot water boiler down a touch? Naturally that’s taken to the bitter end too. Cold showers are bracing!
Thermostats and smart meters are now no longer just bog standard bits of the house, they are more fascinating than the telly! ‘Look how low we can go!’
Dare to admit you aim for a sensible (cost and cosy-wise) 22 degrees and they’ll stare at you in a weird combination of horror and pity.
Even had one (already very skinny) woman boast how exposure to the cold activates ‘brown fat’ which helps to burn calories. While another crowed that she was sleeping in a woolly hat and gloves. The fact that she was so wealthy she owned a Mercedes AND a Jaguar made a mockery of the whole thing of course but she was so wrapped up in the whole cult of cold (not to mention a Prada cardi) she couldn’t see the wood for the frozen trees.
The whole madness can be summed up by one of the things these ice ‘angels’ presumably can make in their own living rooms.
Snow. Balls.