So, Susie, you have your wish.

Here is a pic of me this winter. Pretty ain't I? Note the named wrist rest - legacy of many years of in-house freelancing, and the field glasses to spot deer in the orchard. 

I'm not quite in the clothes described in my previous blog. This is my Mark 1 incarnation this year - vintage fur wrap over my knees, another over my shoulders, the chair lined with sheepskin, and the aforementioned woolly hat. 

The big wool dressing gown (Mark 2) has proved more wearable, actually, and the fingerless gloves, which were formerly kid evening gloves. How the mighty are fallen, including me. But today I am pretty snug in my Adrienne Vittadini ski pants and big boiled-wool jacket with hood, which I bought in 1996 after the winter of minus 15.

Oh la. Anyway, oil to be ordered on Wednesday I hope, and if the price continues to fluctuate in the coming years, there will be nothing for it except to recable the office and work out a summer/winter layout for the house for future winters, because at least wood is a constant and we're not held over a barrel by bloody OPEC. 

Several sets of close friends have had to make similar decisions this winter, vacating whole sections of their houses in favour of the warm bits. One couple have moved back to their old bedroom (now the spare room), which is right on top of their woodburner. Another couple have partitioned off the bedroom above their woodie with a curtain, with their young daughter one side and themselves the other. And the third couple have moved lock, stock and barrel, into their dining room, which a giant woodburner keeps hot all day long. 

Meanwhile, I have made the DH and myself beanies out of polar fleece and if I say so myself, they are fab. I'm wearing mine to sleep in, the DH wears his to work in. Will post a pic at some point. 

It's official - I've turned into my mother.

I realised it this morning when, driven from our bedroom by the bitter cold (a sudden snowfall overnight, which is bringing half of Yurrup to a standstill), I brought my clothes downstairs and dressed in front of the woodburner. As I leant over to warm my bra in front of the fire, I got a sudden flashback to my mother doing the exact same thing back in the 1970s.

The reason was that our house had no central heating, so there was only one point of warmth in the whole place - the coal stove in the living room. When I was a child in the mid-60s, this burned real coal, but after the Clean Air Act, this had to change to coke, which was more expensive, but at least smokeless.

Each morning in winter, the stove, with its slatted glass front, was lit and kept stoked up all day, thrumming away like a little furnace, so although everywhere else in the house was glacial, and the water froze in your bedside glass, the living room was always toasty. Each night, we laid our clothes out on the furniture so they'd keep some heat overnight, then in the morning we'd run downstairs pronto to get dressed in front of the fire.

Being a patriarchal household, the kitchen, where my mother spent a lot of her time, was never heated, although there was a coal stove here too. A fantastic little beast, enamelled in grey and with a long flue, it absolutely pumped out heat, but my father was pretty tight with a dollar, so this was only lit once a day for 30 minutes in order to burn the household rubbish. There was little plastic in those days (meat and fish came wrapped in paper; vegetables you bought loose and put in a string bag and there was no convenience food), so most rubbish that you didn't compost was burnable, and our dustbin (really a bin of dust) was barely filled in a week. 

It strikes me as strange now that my father was so stingy with the heat, because he was a miner and got a free ton of coal every year, making our heating bills considerably less than our neighbours. But his general reluctance to put his hand in his pocket might explain why our house never did get central heating. When Dad keeled over with a coronary in 1987, the house was still running on those old coal burners and my mother was still using an Acme 1950s paddle washing machine with a mangle, which she filled from the taps. Ye gods.

This feels like something out of Dickens, doesn't it? And yet it is so recent. It's the way most of us used to live.   

It is a strange thought now that many of us might have to shift back to the old methods: turning off lights when we leave a room, recycling our waste, using shoppers instead of plastic bags. One big change, I feel, is going to be the reintroduction of space heating (ie: heating the space you're in, rather than heating the whole house).

Our woodburners (a 6kw in the kitchen and a 20kw in the living room) are doing a great job of warming most of the house this year, and generally we are very cosy, but sadly the heat doesn't penetrate into this office, so I am feeling the limitations of space heating. Once again, it will be a freezing winter for working, and as I type this blog I'm sitting on a sheepskin, wearing one 1930s fur cape over my shoulders and another as a lap rug, and a hat and fingerless gloves. Stylish it ain't, but I'm perfectly warm and comfortable although it can't be more than 16 degrees in here.

My grandad, bless him, used to look like a Smurf in his woolly hat, worn indoors all winter even though he snuggled up to the gas fire like a lizard. Perhaps it's genetic. I'll let you know when I come out of hibernation. But for now, I'm off for a walk in the still-falling snow.