Hypothermotastical

My house is freezing cold.  It's been freezing cold for about 2 weeks now, the house is affirmedly in winter mode.

We have sash windows.  I hate sash windows, they are largely single glazed, and have no form of proper seal on them due their design and are completely insecure, so basically, the only advantage over just having one giant hole in your wall, is that you stuff doesn't get wet when it rains.  The wind and the cold however, that comes right in.  You can try to mitigate the heat loss from sash windows by using massive thick heavy curtains, but then you have to have massive thick heavy curtains everywhere, and as this is a rental house, the permission to put the relevant things in the wall.  The bedroom has blinds, the living room has light cotton drapes for privacy, the hallway and the kitchen have nothing.

How about central heating, invented a good 2000 odd years ago and installed in most properties these days, certainly any property I'm going to be paying money for at least, it is designed to circulate heat throughout your house, and thereby raise the ambient temperature to something comfortable, especially in the winter months, thereby eliminating the need for open fires in every room, or the wearing of furs.  Good idea yes?  Well apparently not allowed.  Every time I turn the heating on, my flatmate turns it off as soon as he notices.  Everytime I put the heating on timer, it mysteriously doesn't come on at the right times, because someone has turned it back to the off positions.  What's ironically funny is that my old flatmates from the last 2 years used to do this, because they were worried about bills and money, and my current flatmate was hapily bitching to me about this approach of theirs all the time.

I am currently wearing 4 layers, my entire body is shivering and cold.  My hands and feet are worse.  I have that cold numb ache throughout the entire length of my limbs.  If I try to warm myself up, my body is so cold, as it warms, it develops that stabbing pain you get from cold burns.  I get this even if I try to drink a cup of tea, and my internal temperature is seemingly so low, that even green tea, which I serve properly so about 20 degrees C cooler than 'normal' tea, gives me that horrible burning pain sensation from having something that's too hot as it travels all the way down my oesophagus.


I pay my rent, I pay £50 a month in bills, that's £150 a month for the three of us, £3300 per year.  Allowing about £800 for water rates, that gives us almost £200 a month to spend on electricity and gas, obviously the usage of both goes down dramatically in the summer months, so lets say £150 allowance for summer months, £250 in the winter.  And yet we are seemingly not allowed to have the heating on when it's cold.  I went through this for the last 2 years.  I got a space heater, and had it running almost constantly our house was that cold.  The second you turned it off everything froze again. My last house was in fact so bad, the pipes had to unfreeze every day when the hot water did come on, and we had water leaks in the floors and walls constantly.  So therefore I used the much more expensive electricity, rather than the sensible gas as I wasn't allowed to use the central heating, but my flatmates could hardly say no we're not going to use electricity either.  And I seem to be in the same position in my new place.

I don't understand people.  Chris, is a generally warm person, and he feels okay most of the time, but he admits he's a warm person, and he still shivers for a good while whenever he gets into bed each night.  My flatmate complains how cold it is in the house.  As I said, I've already put a jumper on, and a thermal layer, and a vest, and a t shirt, and jeans, and joggers over that.  I'm doing my energy bit, I'm not being lazy.  But we're not allowed to use the central heating?  What's weirdest is that my flatmate isn't even here most of the time!  And yet somehow he still magically manages to turn the heating off constantly.  Either that, or Chris is lying to me, in which case he's in major major major trouble.

I admit, it's 3 in the morning, it's going to be cold anyway, and I'm ill at the moment, so I'm probably worse than I could be, but I get home at 11pm, at which point, if the heating had been on timer, it should have been on solidly since 5pm so the house should be pleasant, and good until at least 1am or so, as we're all up late all the time in this house.  But no its freezing 24/7/.  And if I'm ill, surely I should be allowed to put the heating on to facilitate not being ill for longer?  Because an ill asthmatic who develops hypothermia every day is obviously a better situation than using the heating.

And it's mid October.  This means it's nowhere near as bad as it's gonna get.  And we have a good 4 5 months of this to go through.  I'm struggling not to completely break as it is anyway; at the moment, this is the thing that is actually going to push me off the edge and I will actually pull a jack.  seriously, I've already done all the planning for it, it's literal a case of whether i choose to do it or not at this point.

I don't even have any refuge at work, for some reason the a/c is left on despite the fact we're ALL sitting there shivering and no-one takes their jackets off when they get in.


Like I say, I don't understand people.  And at the moment, I have nowhere to go, work as enjoyable as it is, simply doesn't pay me enough and I can barely afford to stay till the end of my contract in march, let alone go beyond that, however much I might want to.  And being at home is often unpleasant depending on how my head feels like relating to Chris on any given day.  Add the fact that I'm just as cold, if not actually more so at home all the time, and the best i can do is come home, go straight to bed to try and keep warm, and get up as late as possible before heading to work, and I'm going to resent being in either place before long.