It’s pretty bracing, this snow, and I don’t mean literally. I’ve been consuming snow-related headlines and news coverage for decades: typically, they’d say, “Winter Wonderland”, followed by “travel chaos”; occasionally, “travel chaos leavened by magical snowy landscape”. Some years people would try to mix it up a bit – “Snowtravaganza” was a low point. You just felt bad for the poor sod who had to live with having written it.
All that has been replaced this year with quite detailed instructions on how to survive the cold without going bankrupt: there was a news segment on the radio about how to turn down the internal temperature of your radiators, if you have a combi boiler. This was not information that lent itself naturally to an aural medium. It was like trying to learn how to remove your own appendix by podcast. Nobody panic – there’s also a website! Except, at the same time, everybody panic: it’s great to take judicious steps to economise in energy-straitened times, but it’s not in any way normal to read experts weighing the relative benefits of wearing a hat indoors and putting mini USB heaters in your shoes.
You’ll be fine so long as your extremities don’t get too cold, and they’ll be fine so long as you maintain your core temperature, and that will be fine, so long as you remain in bed, and it is a canard, by the way, that hot drinks keep you lastingly warm, and besides, have you seen the cost of boiling a kettle? This is all good advice (and real, too: I didn’t make it up), particularly for those working from home, but at the same time, it’s quite a fundamental difference between man and beast, the ability to keep warm without having to hunker down or hibernate for a season. The solutions are political (reconsider the profit/cost/taxation split between energy providers and society; separate the carbon market from the green market, so renewables aren’t pegged to the price of gas); they’re geopolitical (war does not help); they’re environmental (efficiency fixes have to be for ever, not just for Christmas). We can’t treat this crisis like a consumer quandary in Which? magazine.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
