Yesterday was one of the worst times for feeling cold in my life. We were heading to the SWAN North East get together for Christmas at the Alan Shearer Centre in Newcastle and we were really looking forward to it.
Firstly, we had to navigate the path to get to the car which we didn’t realise was covered in a film of thin ice and it almost had me flat on my back when my walking crutch slid out from underneath me. Almost simultaneously someone further down the path slipped and hit the floor with a thud. Luckily they were fine and I managed to get into the car without breaking my own neck as well. It was so cold though. It was the kind that seeps into your bones and makes you freezing cold from the inside out. Not even the car heaters could touch how cold my ears, nose and cheeks had become. It got me thinking about when was the worst time I had felt cold and that was when I lived in a house with my mum and sister in the Fairways Estate.
It was one of those houses which had the traditional outhouses but the outside toilet had long been put out of use, nothing was powered by coal anymore so they had become storage areas for bikes, tools and all the other rubbish that you accumulate in a house. I would hate to think how bad it would have been to use the outside loo in the freezing cold weather we get here! Anyway, the house was fairly large with 3 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a living room, kitchen/dining room downstairs which had a passage leading to the back door and the rear garden. The house was in fairly decent repair apart from two things, the first being the hideous wood panels that lined the wall of the kitchen/dining room. They were horrendous. You know that typical 1980’s style ‘fashionable’ panels and they sat about a foot off the actual wall surface so it made the room smaller than it should be. The second thing was the windows. They were the really old single glazed kind of window which was divided into squares but they had another key thing wrong….they didn’t close properly.
The windows did close to a certain extent so that you could lock them but for some reason the frames were a little warped and they had large gaps that would run around them. This meant that the outside temperature often dictated the inside temperature of the rooms. We were having a really cold snap one year and that meant the cold air would seep in through these gaps into the rooms. I was about 12 or 13 at the time and was doing what most teenagers do, hibernating in my room.
I vividly remember waking up one morning and I could see the breath coming from my mouth as I exhaled. Looking over to the window I could see the ice that had created a film over the panes of glass and it had a distorting effect similar to that of a bathroom privacy window so nobody could see in. It was only as I got closer to it that I realised it was on the INSIDE of the window. Yup, the room was so cold the inside of my window had frozen. I knew I had to get out of bed to go and warm up in the living room which was the only room that seemed to retain the heat. Fortunately, by this point I had developed a system of getting dressed with minimum exposure.
It was a shuffle to the underwear drawer and wardrobe with the duvet wrapped tightly around my body. A darting hand grabbed whatever clothing I could get my hands on and then it was a quick shimmy (still wrapped in the duvet) to put them on and finally a sprint downstairs to the warm air of the living room. Ten minutes by the fire was enough to warm you up and banish some of that lingering cold.
It wasn’t just the bedrooms that were cold though, imagine getting a bath in those conditions! I think we all had the quickest baths of our lives in that house, never more than a good wash and sprint to get into bed or get clothes on so that you didn’t get a film of ice on your extremities. (I just laughed out loud thinking about icicles on your ‘you know what’.) The kitchen was pretty bad as well. I can remember boiling a kettle to make tea or coffee and holding my hand above the steam, not too close of course, to try and steal some of the heat to carry the cups back into the living room.
My mum had an accident due to the cold one day though when she was cooking something in the oven. She had taken the grilling pan out of the hot oven and put it on the worktop. She didn’t realise she had touched it with her skin until she tried to pull away and found she had slightly stuck to it and burnt herself. It was that cold there was literally no sensation in her hands. Thankfully there was no permanent damage, but it just goes to show just how bad that house really was! Thankfully I wasn’t there for too much longer but I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever been as cold as that any other time in my life.
When in your life have you been the coldest? Was it a certain situation or a certain place that you can remember? I would love to hear yours so drop me a message and let me know or write a post on it and I will stick a link up to it here.
Until next time folks,
Stay Safe and Keep Smiling (Keep Warm as well).
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