But at least they aren't as cold as in the past.
Well actually that's a nonsense thing to say because they are just as cold. It's just that we now have central heating, hot water and what I call warmy things to wear.
I'm old school when it comes to heating. We try not to put it on until late afternoon. It's cheaper to get the bus into Norwich and look round the shops and have a coffee than it is to have the heating on at home.
Of course back in the 1950s and 60s we didn't have the option of activating a switch to instantly warm the place up. A roaring coal fire would do the trick for the lounge but wasn't a lot of use for the rest of the house.
I remember really having to think twice about going to the toilet in the house in which I was born. It would mean leaving the relative warmth of the lounge and going through a freezing cold hall and up stairs onto a landing and into a very cold bathroom.
Sleeping involved wrapping yourself up in as many blankets as possible (we didn't have duvets) and waking up to find ice on the inside of the windows as well as on the outside. Hot water was hard to come by and so had to be rationed and I vaguely remember what was termed a strip down wash in a tin bath in the lounge with water heated from a kettle.
As I write this I'm back there. Living in a shop didn't help much either as people were continually opening the door and letting in the cold.
Isn't it strange how I vividly remember this and can't remember the summers? I remember the very cold winter of 1963 when pipes froze or cracked in the cold and standpoints were put up in the streets to get water from.
A few years ago our boiler appeared to go wrong during a particularly cold spell. I think it got down to minus six or seven and we couldn't get any heating on. I went up into the loft to reset the boiler on numerous occasions. I rang a helpline to be told that it was a common occurrence in particularly cold weather for boilers to pack up. That seems absolutely ridiculous because that's exactly when you need them to function the most. As soon as temperatures rose, the boiler was back in action.
I have just finished reminiscing about my childhood in the early chapters of my autobiography "A Charmed Life". I'm currently editing it and hope to get it published in the New Year after our book on Le Paradis Massacre is out. I have mixed feelings about the autobiography. Why on earth would anyone want to read it as I've had such an ordinary life? But hopefully that will be its selling point, talking about ordinary things like ice on the inside of windows and wrestling on the TV on Saturday afternoons.
Once those books are out it will be a deep edit of my blogs from the first year of writing them. I think I'm going to call them "Driblings and Ramblings- how to survive a year of lockdown."
I am pleased that I wrote the blog and also kept a personal diary of lockdown. I hope that publishing them will act as a record of some extraordinary times and fulfill my role in life as a journalist ie a keeper of journals.
The children's party in our new village pavilion went off very well. It was organised by the Friends of Hethersett Library. Last year we held it in the library but that was a bit crowded. So this year it was in the new pavilion which has plenty of space so that parents had the option of staying in a separate room and having a cup of coffee or going away and returning a couple of hours later.
If you live in or around Hethersett and are looking for facilities to hire, do go and look at the new pavilion which is now called Hethersett Hub. The facilities are first class and it's a credit to the village although not everyone views it as such, but that's another story.
Today it's another craft fair, this time at Park Farm Hotel. I'm building up a lot of Christmas photographs for the next Hethersett Herald.