Our kitchen is normally so cold that you have to pluck up the courage to go out there in the winter. You sit in the as close to hermetically sealed sitting room for as long as possible, get the fire ramped up so hard that the room gets up to about 15⁰C and hope you don’t need to brave a trip to the loo. If you get really desperate, you dash out to the loo and bung the kettle on while you’re out there so that even though your blood turns to ice, it can be defrosted by the heat of a cup of coffee. In the years since we moved into our house, we have rarely managed to crank up the heat in the sitting room to beyond 16⁰C in winter. The rest of the house has always been considerably colder. That’s despite spending 3-4 times on heating than we did in Sandhurst.

So, now we have the house wrapped in a blanket and do you know what? It’s actually warm. We don’t have to shut ourselves into a single room and get the fire raging to feel warm. We feel warm most of the time. I get up in the morning and come downstairs without a dressing gown. We sit in the sitting room of an evening with both (internal) doors open and the temperature stays above 18-19⁰C. We never think of lighting the fire until 8-8.30pm, where once it was the first thing we did when coming home.

I was cooking tonight and wanted to check that my veggie shepherd’s pie was hot all the way through so I got out my third-favourite kitchen gadget (behind the bread machine and the Kitchen Aid) to test it and noticed, while it lay on the side, that the ambient temperature in our kitchen was more than 17⁰C. Balmy. Brilliant. Beautiful.