The Joy of Warmth

Winter in 1970’s Britain was grim, not just because of the endless strikes, heartless politicians, cheesy glam bands and creepy disc jockeys but because…it was cold. It seemed to snow more too. Lots of slippery fall on your bum kind of ice. My dad putting socks over his shoes to get to work in one piece kind of ice. Long, dark, harsh, unforgiving winters. Winters of discontent. A decade of discontent. That’s how I remember it. Cold winters didn’t stop in the 70’s. They iced up the early 80’s too.

Around this time, in the early 80’s, I lost count of the number of times we were sent home from school due to burst pipes and malfunctioning boilers. School would shut because of the cold, that’s how cold it was. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen often enough. I’m not sure it was worth the early stages of frostbite. I walked home from freshly closed schools with feet like blocks of ice. Even when I sat with my feet right up against the gas fire, trying to thaw them, it would take at least half an hour before I could feel them again. The numbness was scary. It’s a nasty, queasy feeling when your feet are divorced from your legs. It’s difficult to take your shoes off when you can’t feel your feet. They are heavy and phantom at the same time. Once the shoes were off, it got a little easier. It took another half hour before I could feel my feet. Surprised I didn’t lose a few toes, or a foot or two.

Not quite so scary or dangerous as frost bitten feet, but just as Dickensian, were the nights. We didn’t have central heating. The only heat was in the form of a gas fire in the living room. It was so cold in my bedroom at night, that I used to wear six layers of clothing in bed. Here is what I used to wear on a nightly basis when I was a teenager :

1st Layer -Nightdress

2nd Layer -Dressing gown

3rd Layer- Thin short cardigan

4th Layer -Slightly thicker short cardigan

5th Layer -Slightly thicker cardigan than the last one

6th Layer -Thick, chunky, long Starsky and Hutch style cardigan, with woolen belt.

The bed had about eight or nine blankets on it. There were no duvets in those days, well, not in our house.It was cold but it was a veritable tundra in the nether regions of the bed. My feet could not even dare to plumb the freezing depths, not even three quarters down. It would be like plunging your feet into a cottony fridge. I would say halfway down was the cut off point. I would curl into a foetal position. The feet had to stay high. Difficult when you’re five foot eleven and you have to stay in that position for the whole night.

Maybe sometimes, as the night progressed, the feet would be able to go a little further down. Although it was a slow gradual process, little by little, over time, I could warm up layers of cold further down in the bed. By morning, the conditions down there would be temperate at least, but of course, by then it would be too late. Time to get up.

Some part of me hankers for that, well, maybe not that, but elements of the past simply because I was young and my whole life was in front of me. It’s the past and I’ll never have it again. The past when all said and done can seem safer than the future, no matter how depressing or miserable it seemed. Why would I want that again? I don’t. It’s just that nostalgia can seem fuzzy and warm, despite the cold.

It sounds like I have a cold feet problem but if I did then, I certainly don’t now. Thanks to central heating, hot flashes and thermal lambswool socks, I now have toasty warm feet all day and all night long! Hurrah! A happy ending!

Quote of the Week

‘Don’t let anyone say to you that nothing exciting ever happens to you when you are old. Because it does. And it’s just as nice to be seventy as it is to be young.’

–Agatha Christie (from the Mousetrap Man by Peter Saunders)

Waltzing Matilda

Just me

And my feet

And my swag

In the heat

Just me

All alone

With the dreams

that I own

It’s a dance

of a kind

stripped down

and bare

Come walk

with me

Try a smile

if you dare

It’s a life

that I live

With my world

in a bag

I don’t have

a house

or a boat

0r a Jag.

It’s not a dance

or a girl

or a square

stable home

It’s the earth

and the sky

and the road

that I roam.

Just a waltz

down the lane

With the dust

in my eyes

Matilda and me

Have said

our goodbyes.

The Joy of Sex Education

There were only two times I remember there being sex education at our school. The first time was in biology class. My biology teacher looked like a cross between Magnus Pyke and Dr Snuggles. He was a decent man and a competent teacher. Normally we talked about animals or plants or we dissected frogs but this day was different.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, to this day, our biology teacher decided to forgo our usual lesson on things like photosynthesis and osmosis and decided to talk about how humans procreate, from start to finish with all the icky bits. Perhaps someone in charge of the cirriculum had decided we knew nothing about sex and needed teaching. We were eleven, so most of us knew something about sex in varying degrees. Maybe he decided to talk about this off his own bat. Was it improvised? Had he been up all night rehearsing? Was this the one lesson in the year he had been dreading for months, or looking forward to?

No. He hadn’t been looking forward to it at all. That fact showed in his whole demeanour. I’ve never seen a man get through a talk with such obvious awkwardness. During some moments, he looked like he was in physical pain.

The lesson stands out for two reasons, the strained seriousness and extreme effort of Pyke Snuggles to convey the basic biological processes of procreation and the doubled over please stop making us laugh, it really hurts now, no seriously, please stop sir, but he wouldn’t. We were not emotionally mature enough for this talk, not in a class setting. I like to think I was. For the first fifteen minutes, I sat there very composed and attentive and straight faced. After a while though, I was as bad ad the rest of them, who were practically rolling around on the floor clutching the stomachs.

It began with embarrassed sniggers but just got worse. Laughter and perhaps embarrassment is contagious. If he only knew, we were in pain too, trying to stifle our laughter but as with all these things, the more you try to stop doing something, the more you sometimes can’t stop doing it. Eventually, we gave in and let it all out. We drowned out his voice with our laughter. Perhaps that was deliberate.

I felt a combination of sympathy and distress for Pyke Snuggles. On one hand, I was sensitive to his extreme discomfort and frequent red face. On the other, I wanted him to continue, as this was the most fun I’d had in years. Even Fawlty Towers didn’t make me laugh this much. It was very conflicting. It was also painful to laugh so much.

At one point, he got cross with us and started shouting. This just made us laugh even more. It was at that point in mirth evolvement when everything he said and everything he did made us explode. We were far too over stimulated to back down now. It was like he was suddenly the best stand up comedian in the world and we’d paid good money to be entertained.

He gave up and we ended class early. As Pyke Snuggles exhausted stooped frame exited the classroom, I couldn’t help thinking he was going for a much earned lie down with a couple of Valium.