Re the babydoll, I'm not gonna leave it open, that ruins the surprise
The type of biscuit she ate was a savoury kind like Ritz crackers, or pretzils (sp?) - you know, the kind your president choked on, on an airplane.
Cookies are generally chocolate chip ones or shortbread ones, oatmeal, rye etc are called crackers. I haven't heard of oreos. Gabriel mentioned them and I didn't know what he was talking about.
I don't know what temperature my heat is set but I can tell you my house is tiny so it gets really warm. It comes on twice automatically and I never look at it - once at night and once first thing in the morning.
I pay £18 month for gas, £18 for electric. In the summer I don't have it on at all.
It was about 12 or 13 degrees C outside yesterday so I went out without my coat. Spring is here!
Lou, I used to live in an 1860's railway cottage with no heat. It was totally original like it used to be except for the toilet and the double glazing, but even the windows were the original 1860's shape (oval) - all the neighbours were the same, no heat.
I wrote about it in my book so I thought I'd paste you that part since you are interested in Brits and heating issues, it'll come in handy for your research
Here it is:
We moved into a bigger house in preparation for the baby, a lovely railway cottage from 1860, opposite a railway line, with a large garden. We were pleased to find the neighbours extremely welcoming and friendly, and a real community atmosphere. You don’t often find that these days. There were 10 cottages, which were originally built for the railway workers and their families, and then an 11th cottage, which was much bigger and set back from the rest. This was the ‘Station Master’s’ house and was now occupied by a frail old lady in her 80’s! I wondered what she did all day, rattling around in that huge house, all to herself. We lived in the third cottage. There was no central heating in our house, or in any of the other houses. The only type of heating we had was a gas fire in the living room. Nothing else at all. Rail Track owned the road and the land, so until 1985, there were no toilets. If you had the call of nature, you had to go down the bottom of the garden to the outhouse! Some of my neighbours had lived there for years and still remembered this. Then they all complained that it was freezing to sit on an outdoor loo in winter, so Rail Track demolished them all, then gutted the pantry’s that were still in the cottages and turned them into tiny bathrooms. There was only just enough room in our bathroom to fit everything and we had to squeeze round the tub to get to the lavatory. The lack of heating meant that I noticed the changing seasons much more than usual. Winter really meant winter. Sometimes it was so cold, that Peter and I would sleep in the living room, on the floor by the fire. Our neighbours did this sometimes as well. Suddenly I realised why bed socks were invented; they weren’t the domain of granny’s, they were a necessity – you’d freeze otherwise. Occasionally if it was unbearable, we put on this really old electric heater that was older than both of us. It took all night before you even noticed it was on, and wasted so much energy and money that we only used it if we were desperate. Many an evening was spent huddled in bed under millions of blankets, cuddling and making love, not just for the romance and because we were in love, but because it was too damn cold to do anything else! I really understood how it was that people in the past had such large families, with no heating and no TV, what else was there to do!?! It was too cold to use our bath. Despite being a tiny bathroom, it didn’t make any difference to the temperature. I’d be wiping frost off the window when I walked in. The idea of getting undressed to bathe in there was enough to have me fainting. We got the baby bath that we’d bought for our expected baby (much bigger than standard baby baths) and put that in front of the living room fire, then filled it up with water from the kettle. I’d strip off and sit in the bath by this fire, sponging myself down. It was just like the old days, when they had tin baths and would wash in the front room, it was the only way to do it with no heating. I would be sitting there, soaping myself and my little ‘bump’ that was our child, and Peter would be on the phone, talking to his dad! ‘How’s Jo? Yeah, she’s fine’, he grinned at me, there in the nude with bubble bath all over me while his dad asked how I was! Some of the neighbours had given in and spent thousands on central heating, but most of us couldn’t afford it, so we braved the world as we were, like one huge community. Group meetings for warming tea and biscuits were commonplace and we frequently discussed the latest deals in the local textile shop, for bedding and other heat-saving things. It was totally normal to knock on someone’s door and ask if they wanted to come round for a hot chocolate drink!
BTW, changed his name for book purposes - that brought back a few freezing memories.
