Dear LPG, 

I know that we have had a few cold days lately but winter so far has not been that bad in London this year.  I say that even though I know that one person’s ‘not so cold’ is another person’s ‘freezing’, but I am betting that most of the readers of LPG are old enough to remember the winter of 1962, which particularly sticks out in my mind.

Back then central heating was not always built into homes and many of us kept warm with paraffin heaters and coal powered fire places which had to be sorted out each morning and cleaned so that one member of the household could generate some warmth for the rest of the family to appreciate.  As a child I remember my mum having less of a problem getting me and my siblings up and dressed in a hurry, we worked quickly just to keep warm.  There was no timer to wake the central heating system before we got up in the morning and triggering it could not be done by flicking a switch on your watch or mobile phone.   But in my mind there was something special about the warm glow of an orange flickering fire that the radiator cannot make up for no matter how much more efficient it is.   

Even though we don’t really need them anymore, it is interesting how many wall-mounted electric fires with artificial glow are still to be found on the living room walls of a home which has central heating that does the job equally as well, kid yourself not, a gas heater or electric fan heater is just not the same either. 

I still remember coming in from school or work with cold fingers and stretching them out towards the glow of a warm set of flames neatly flickering over a neatly stacked pile of coal, but now those fires are a thing of the past as are chilblains and cold hands.  Perhaps we are less likely to have to walk so far before reaching the front door and, when we get there, the heating will already be on because the timer will have kicked in.  

I do agree that those fires were more dangerous and the burning of fuels like coal, which was delivered by the coalman in a sack and emptied through the coal hole in the cellar, also contributed to all the really foggy days that we experienced back then.    But there was something about a real fire which made me feel warmer inside and out.

I remember once in the mid-1980s buying my then five-year-old daughter a Victorian dolls house and as she pulled all the bits of furniture out of the box she came across the fireplace, looked at me and asked, ‘What is this for Mum?’.

The youngsters don’t know what they missed... 

CL, Lewisham

CL tells that the video she has chosen might help you to think a bit warmer on a cold day…

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