The old-fashioned British attitude to the cold weather still baffles me. Why on earth did/do we struggle on in unheated houses and flats when even the poor Russians in the nineteenth century knew how to keep their wooden houses warm, and a visit to a Scandinavian country makes you realise it's not absolutely necessary to suffer in winter?
We live in a draughty house (it was built in 1929) and we do our best to keep it warm. But yesterday I went to an amazing location in London for a photoshoot for my book, and it made our house feel like an overheated sauna. It was beautiful, atmospheric, layered with history, full of original features (it was built in the early eighteenth century) and bloody freezing. There were draughts that were more like Arctic winds, and a chilliness that felt like the inside of a fridge. It was authentically cold; poeple lived here for several centuries and didn't bother to install any form of heating other than small, open fires that had to be lit every morning.
In the first room we used there was a copy of the book I am reading, and it couldn't have been more apposite. This house was in Spitalfields, one of the parts of London Dickens wrote about, and it's recently been used as a location for the TV adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the film version of Great Expectations and, a while ago, for the BBC's Bleak House. Dickens is just as good on feeling the cold as he is on the jolly warmth of the hearth, but I'm still wondering how any of the characters who lived in similar places (and the actors playing them in this house) could speak without their teeth chattering permanently.
[By coincidence, this morning I saw this beautiful shawl knitted by Suse. Clearly this is what I need to be knitting to combat the cold.]
