Working from home
By Ted Bruning
Spring is here at last, and with it comes the end of a dreadful dilemma that has been plaguing me since November – whether to turn on the central heating or not? Our new house is a dreadful wind-tunnel. An icy blast rips straight through it from the illfitting front door to the catflap in the kitchen. The dining room that serves as my office is right in the middle of the house and man! Is it cold! The fact that the ancient wooden sash windows are more gap than glass doesn’t help, but as the house is listed and in a conservation area they can’t be replaced. The central heating comes on at 6.30am, the boiler coming alive with a rattle and a roar that served the entire household as an alarm-clock until we got used to it. By 7am the house is toasty – almost too toasty, in fact. Then one by one the family emerges, blinking and bleary, breakfasts, and departs for whatever quotidian joys await. Leaving me and my dilemma. The heating is timed to go off at 9.30, and within a few moments the house has gone polar again. I could just turn it on again, but it seems wasteful to heat the whole house when I’m sitting on my tod in a single room. On the other hand I could go round turning off all the radiators in the rooms that aren’t being used, but it takes forever and anyway, I no longer particularly want to go into my teenage son’s room. I’m sure some the old washing that’s strewn about the place is alive and could well be dangerous. Besides, then I’d have to do the same tour again and turn all the radiators on when the heating shudders back into life at 4.30. Could I be bothered? I most certainly could not! The alternative is to make do with a single bar of the ancient electric fire in the dining room. This does the job all right – on one side of me, which gets char-grilled, while the other remains deep frozen. But here’s the dilemma (and it’s one that we middle-class liberals get genuinely handwringing about, so don’t laugh): which alternative is the less destructive to Lifeboat 36
Earth? Is it the carbon-rich fumes wheezing into the atmosphere from the flue of the gas boiler, or is it whatever eco-outrages are perpetrated in order to squirt a trickle of current into the electric fire? I really don’t know, and it’s doing my head in. On a more prosaic note, I don’t know which alternative is the more expensive, either. A manlier man than me could probably read the meters and sort the data to make meaningful comparisons. But for me and the bills it’s out of sight, out of mind. There is, of course, a politically correct option, which would be to insulate the house properly. But how do you insulate a 17th-century cottage without ripping out the entire interior and, effectively, starting from scratch? Cavity wall insulation? Don’t make me laugh! The windows we’ve already dealt with. As for loft insulation – well, the loft is the attic bedroom, my son’s sinister eyrie. If you tried to clad the sloping ceiling with insulating foam and then put up the necessary plasterboard the headroom would be reduced still further and the poor boy would have to bend double to get in. And anyway, even if there are grants available towards the cost I have a feeling that persuading the landlord to make any additional investment that might be necessary would be about as easy as converting Iran to Wesleyan Methodism. So there’s only one thing for it. Before next winter comes, I’ll have to buy a jumper.
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