Intro

Possibly the most useful way of dealing with being cold is just to put up with it. So you're cold! Until it really interferes with your life that doesn't actually matter. The world doesn't really owe you a comfortable temperature. You owe the world for letting you live on it, and screwing it up with constant air conditioning and huge amounts of electric heat that you don't actually need is no way to say thanks.

I'm not saying you should always be cold, or that you should never heat your house, or that you must or should do anything, really. I'm not the boss of you, right? And it's good to be comfortable. And it's probably not healthy to be shivering all the time, particularly if you're old or sick or very young. It's just that there are a lot of ways to be comfortable, as well as the fact that temperate comfort is not always necessary. AND, being comfortable doesn't mean living in perfect decadent luxury, either.

Fuel prices are up and fuel is running out and "carbon footprints" are apparently a good thing to keep down for other reasons, too. Electric heat is one of the biggest fuel users, so it makes good economic (and otherwise) sense to keep warm in ways other than central or supplemental heating.

If you wear snug winter clothes and indoor areas are heated-to-usual-levels, you get too hot. When can you wear all the wonderful wool and fur and padded or lined clothing, if it's too hot in winter? Winter clothes are ace; giving up the opportunities you get to wear then comfortably is just plain silly. Turn down the heating, and ask for it to be so at work or school or uni, too. Not all the way, if you prefer (there will be some people who are dressed for the heated rooms). But until it's just so.

And think, if you dress with a mind to the weather, and keep warm in the wind and rain and snow and chills, when you get to where you're going ot get home, that's a LOT of layering you'll need to take off or sweat under. If you dress for where you're going, that's a nasty cold you might get on the way there in your thin year-round garments. But if the temperature doesn't change too greatly between indoors and out, you can wear your warm, stylish winter layers inside, and add your warm, stylish winter coat/hat/gloves/scarf/boots outside. And never once be dressed wrongly for the heat.

So this is aspiring to be a bit of a how-to for people who don't live with cold weather all year round (I live in the northern half of England) and who it takes by surprise when it does come. It's very possible I'm saying nothing new at all to anyone who might come across this page, and I didn't check if there were any other blogs along these lines.. But this one is from my perspective. And I *might* have something new to say, who knows?