47 of 50

This year has been one of parallels to my younger self, not all of them have been particularly pleasant e.g. the aggression of Russia in Ukraine compared to the Cold War of my childhood, but others have been a little more whimsical.

As a kid the majority of the heating in our house came from an open fire in the winter, on which logs and coal were the main sources of fuel. Although it was pretty good at heating the whole house there were parts it didn’t reach. This included our beds. For these we had plenty of blankets and quilts and when things got really cold there was the humble hot water bottle. These were later replaced by central heating where bedrooms were heated and supplemental heating wasn’t required.

As an adult I don’t think I’ve owned a hot water bottle until now. With the rising cost of energy we’ve made a concerted effort to use less energy including turning our heating down / off. To make up for this we’ve gone back to using hot water bottles at night, purchasing them at the little village hardware store for around £5 each.

In the last week temperatures have dropped, we reached -6°C on a couple of nights and rarely got above 4°C during the day, but there’s something quite comforting having a sack of warmth on or next to your feet, and which stays warm for most of the night.

I can’t help but marvel at how a rubber bladder of hot water can keep you warm in the way it does and I had completely forgotten this. I do remember from my childhood the rubber failing on occasion and waking in the night to find yourself a little damp, but so far this hasn’t happened to us and as our bottles are relatively new hopefully won’t anytime soon.

Sometimes the old solutions are still the best.

Thanks for reading.

46 of 50

Christmas.

It means different things to all of us, and over the years these things change. I doubt very much if anyone’s Christmas remains the same from childhood to adulthood even if only the roles change as we get older. That said I suspect we each have little traditions that we do at this time of year, even if you’re not someone who celebrates this festival.

Some of these might date back to childhood and have followed us all the way through to adulthood, others might be more recent. For many years I’ve read Dicken’s Christmas Carol or one of his other Christmas stories in the run up to Christmas itself.

There are also a few that stopped or changed when a particular relative passed away or became unable to do them. My Grandma always used to make our Christmas puddings (plus Brandy Butter and Rum Butter). She had her own recipe for the pudding, and would batch make them often so that there would be one for different members of the family. This then fell to my Mum and ultimately to me. I know that the recipes are very different, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly how.

I think this is also true of other times of the year or for certain things. They’ll be a goto family member for certain things in many families or a particular tradesman who’s always used for something. Until recently we had a goto gasman who did our boiler services etc. When he decided to retire we had to find someone else. With many of these types of things there’s an element of trust – that they’ll do good work, won’t overcharge, etc, etc,. Often though it’s a recommendation from friends or family in terms of who they use.

This year having recently moved it seems like we’ll be having some slightly new traditions or variations on a theme. I don’t think that we’ll have properly settled into Christmas in our new home this year and we’ll be having a very quiet celebration. We have found all of our decorations amongst the myriad of boxes that we still haven’t managed to unpack, and we have a tree and limited other decorations.

So what if anything are your traditions? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

45 of 50

Before I get started with this week’s post there is a hangover from last week. When I was writing about my Auntie Matt I was sure that I had a photograph of her and I intended to include it with the post. By try as I might I couldn’t find it before the post went out. Then randomly I opened an envelope and it was in there with a whole host of other photos that I’d forgotten about. So I’ve added a scan of that photo at the end of this week’s post. Speaking of which…

I’ve mentioned before about Collecting Books and the Stephen King novels that I own. In the last week or so I picked an old Stephen King novel off of my shelves to reread. I say reread but really it’s been 30+ years since I’ve read this book and although I knew the general premise I soon discovered that I had forgotten most of the story. The book is ‘Salem’s Lot.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. Firstly this book is the same age as me, and secondly it is one of the only stories to have directly given me nightmares.

I first read it in my middle teenage years, having read some of King’s later novels before it, most notably It and Christine. I guess at the time I’d gotten a taste for his books and was hoovering up every one that I could find.

I don’t remember the nightmare now, but I do remember the feeling of it and waking in a sweat having just escaped or perhaps succumbed to the blood sucking residents of the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot.

Perhaps you’re wondering then if the book had such an effect on me all those years ago, would it now? I did; and then I figured that I had my grown man pants now, so surely not. Right? Right??!!??

Well, although I do have my grown man pants, I also have my falling asleep while reading jacket too. Books these days take me a lot longer to read than they used to as the old man nap gene kicks in after a couple of pages and pretty soon I’m doing the nodding dog and then I’m gone. Asleep.

It took me a while to get through the book and so on this reread, no nightmares. I did find the book just as creepy and scary as I did all those years ago and I still rate it as one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read but no nightmares.

Thanks for reading.

44 of 50

The temperatures have started to drop this week and I’ve been wearing a hat and gloves on my early morning dog walks. For me this is most likely to be a wool or insulated beanie hat if it’s dry and a baseball cap if it’s raining. I wear the baseball cap because it means I can turn my head with my hood up and the peak of the cap pushes the hood around so that I can see and don’t have to pull the hood to one side. Great for crossing roads and general visibility. My gloves are a bit of a mixture, I had some of those posh ones that meant I could still use my phone with them on but I can’t find those since we moved so I’m using whatever comes to hand.

I’m reminded of my childhood too and my Great Auntie Matt. She was a knitter and for Christmas each year she would knit me a combination of hat, gloves and a scarf from the leftover wool she had from whatever projects she’d been working on that year. This meant that I could end up with a kaleidoscope set of protection against the cold. The gloves might be one colour or they might be any mixture up to having all the fingers and thumbs different colours, stripes were not uncommon.

These gifts were a bonus for me as they often came at the point where the set from the previous year were wearing out or had been misplaced. I used to do a paper-round, so whatever the colour the gloves started out as they would always end up blackened by newsprint.

I can picture my Auntie Matt in her little bungalow knitting away. She used to stay up late watching her black and white television, she particularly enjoyed the snooker (despite the obvious impediment) but would rebuff any attempts to encourage her to buy a colour set. She lived there with a succession of particularly evil cats and I can remember one Christmas Day morning we spent several hours at Accident and Emergency because one of those cats had scratched her so badly that we couldn’t stop the wound bleeding.

35 years on and I miss those soft squashy Christmas parcels that kept me warm around to the next Christmas and she was knitting right up until the end.

Thanks for reading.