Dear LPG, 

I am getting older, and adjusting to the colder days has become more wearing on my body over recent years.  Even though the central heating is on, and it is not really that cold in the house, during the winter mornings, I find it harder to throw off the bed covers, and I think that has a lot more to do with what my mind is telling me than how I feel.

It is also becoming more challenging as the cost of keeping warm increases because of all the extra-large bills we know we will face for the next few months. 

I am writing at the beginning of October 2024. I have lived in the UK all my life, but my family comes from the West Indies, where it is never freezing, although the people there will dispute that.

 I remember my cousin coming for a holiday at the turn of the century.   She arrived too late for a whole ‘Windrush’ experience, but it was a snowy winter’s day, and the cold hit the minute she got off the plane.   In the warm car, as we left the airport, she looked around excitedly, and her first reaction was, ‘It looks exactly like the pictures on all those Christmas cards you sent. '  

We were in the middle of the school Christmas holidays, and a few days later, she accompanied me and my then two young children to a community centre where the event was cancelled because we could not get the tea urn to work. Still, we stayed, and the children taught her about the joy of snowballs.  After about half an hour, she had had enough; she told me that while it was all magical and beautiful, she would like us to turn off the cold aspect of winter.  It hit home for her that there was no switch for that. 

Her experience got me thinking about our reaction to September when autumn has the annual habit of reminding us that winter is coming.  We grin and bear it, but what of the people who live where it is freezing?   While looking around the internet recently, I found a film guaranteed to make anyone feel warmer no matter how cold the weather is on the day you read my message, and I thought it worth sharing...

JW, Catford 

JW offers a video that she thinks will make you feel much warmer today…

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