Turning Up the Heat

Have you noticed the creeping campaign against central heating of late?  I first encountered it earlier this week in an apparently innocuous segment of a local magazine programme on TV, ostensibly focusing on a couple who have reduced their energy bills to only three pounds a month.  All the usual energy saving measures were shown - woodburners, insulation, solar energy and all the other usual suspects - before they dropped the bombshell: to really save energy costs you have to switch off your central heating.  Which seems obvious, except that you'll freeze during the Winter.  Unless you restrict yourself to one heated room, according to these energy saving gurus.  Yes, that's right, for the winter months (which seem to get longer and longer in the UK) we should live primarily in a specially insulated room heated by a wood burning stove, venturing only to the arctic climes of the rest of the house when absolutely necessary and swaddled in ten layers of warm clothing.

Central heating, you see, is an evil that crept into our houses during the sixties and seventies - before then people, well, the lower classes, were a hardier, (not to mention shorter lived and less healthy), breed, who didn't mind freezing during the cold months.  We've all gone soft thanks to evil central heating and need to give up our addiction, with that saving on energy bills being the incentive.  Now, I grew up in a sixties built house that sort of had central heating from new.  I say sort of, basically it had two radiators downstairs, one in the hall, one in the living/dining room and one upstairs in the bathroom.  During the winter it always felt as if we spent months imprisoned in the living room - making dashes upstairs to use the bathroom only when absolutely necessary.  It really wasn't much fun and things got worse when my parents had an unheated extension built which was then used as a dining room.  Shivering your way through meals is a real appetite killer.  I really don't think it unreasonable to have the whole of your house heated so that, regardless of the time of year, the entire family don't have to huddle in a single room and the whole property can be utilised.

Anyway, a few days after seeing this programme what should I see on the BBC News site but a story claiming that central heating makes us fat!  (Possibly because, as I've already noted, trying to eat your meals in an unheated room kills your appetite).  Clearly, some kind of right wing government conspiracy was at work.  But just why do the bastards want us to abandon our central heating?  Maybe they think that huddling together in a single room for months on end will rekindle some of those family values they like to bang on about.  Then again, they might just want the old and poor to freeze to death, thereby cutting expenditure on pensions and benefits.  Whatever the reason, there definitely seems to be a media campaign to discredit central heating.  That said, the campaign could already be backfiring: that energy saving couple were hardly the best advert for switching off your central heating.  Their entire lives seem to consist of trying to stay warm and  foraging for wood for their bloody stove.  Frankly, they strike me as an even better reason for turning up your heating than avoiding hypothermia.