Cold houses in the past…

I have no heating in my bathroom or any other room except my main living room and there I have a lovely gas fire that warms the room beautifully so I m no different now to when I grew up
I cannot afford to have central heating put in this big 1875 house but it’s the only thing I ve ever owned and I will never leave it till the day I die.
I have adapted but I just look forward to spring arriving

By the way Cabbage I m not 150 and I don’t sit hunched over in 20 cardigans I do have a big thick oodie though

Oh yes, M0nica, the stereotype caricutures of the elderly are surely an AI mock-up, always an old woman of at least 140, 1950's perm and without her false teeth, wearing about a dozen cardigans and bent over a one-bar electric fire staring forlornly at it's feeble glow and probably recalling the Good Old Days when Prince Albert was alive........

These ads for oldies charities really need to stop fostering these distorted Dickensian images and perceptions of old people (or Senior Citizens if you prefer, but old is old) if they want to carry on raking in enough donations to pay for the Chief Executive's expenses.

Firstly, I do think we feel the cold more when we are older than we did when we were young. Stereotype pictures/drawings/ phtographs of old people at almost every period, shows older people, especially women swathed in shawls and thick slippers.

I can certainly remember feeling the cold aas a child. The way one automatically braced one self as I walked out of the nice warm kitchen into the freezing cold hall and going upstairs to freezing cold loo upstairs.

I can remember, at one of my aunts, getting into bed fully dressed and undressing while in bed clutching my hotwater bottle and shoving all my clothes to the bottom of the bed so that they would be warm when I put them on in the morning, because the bedroom was so cold.

I remember my sister walking to and from school crying with cold when the winter was bitter because she was so cold even when wearing the full acoutrement of clothes , woolly vest, Liberty bodice, viyella school blouse, school tunic, cardigan and a thick school uniform coat.

Houses had small areas of warmth in deserts of cold.

When we married, in the late 1960s, we bought a new house off plan and that came with cnetral heating as standard, and what bliss it was. I think the house came with 2 inches of insulation and I can rmemeber that within a few weeks of moving in DH added another 2inches of insulation. I think in every house we have owned, one of the first things we have done shortly after buying it is to increase the insulation in the roof.

Just the coal fire in the living room.

I definitely think it's because we are older. The temperature in DS and Dil and the 4 childrens house leaves me and other grandparents freezing to bits, the children running around bare feet and not a lot on!
And when DS was young, not a lot of heating there either - some old and very inefficient CH not turned on high:

And I dont recall being cold as a child in the early 1950's, and when the windows had frost patterns on and no heating in the bedrooms!

It used to be very cold in Winter. Girls didn’t wear trousers so much and I remember my knees being freezing. The only heating was a coal fire in one room and some sort of water heater in the kitchen. That was London, 1950 s and early 60 s. At night we used hot water bottles and piled coats on the bed. No one had cars but I used to run everywhere all the time to keep warm.
Now we don’t have double glazing or anything like that but it doesn’t get really cold here in Australia. Reaches freezing point maybe a couple of times a year. This year has been colder than most and we have had fires on even in December. I think the global warming has passed us by because it used to be much,much hotter around 20 years ago.