Eating or heating?

With the news that Russia has cut gas supplies in one of its periodic penis-waving contests with Ukraine, and that temperatures are bottoming out near enough to minus 10 degrees Celsius even in the comparatively temperate South of England, we're all in a panic about our fuel bills again.

As usual, first thoughts are for older people. They cannot always afford the heating bills, even with the extra benefits Labour has (to be fair) allowed them over the last 10 or so years. They are obliged either to turn the thermostat down or to find savings somewhere else to pay for it. This will be an especially acute problem for many this year, given the disastrous performance both of the stock market and of savings.

It will also be serious hardship for those affected by the crisis in another way too - the jobless. Like me, for instance. Some years ago, when I lived in two rooms of a stone house with single-glazed windows in Aberystwyth, I thought I had learned the meaning of real cold - cold so bad that my brain actually started malfunctioning, as it would in a severe bout of flu, but all the time. I had hoped that when I moved away from that place, heated only by two small electric radiators, I had seen the end of that.

Alas, no. I have, in absolute desperation at the amount of fuel I am consuming, been obliged to adjust my heating to 14 degrees celsius. This is not quite so bad as it may sound. First of all, the central heating is now on 24/7 on thermostat, because at that temperature it is cheaper to leave it on than having it constantly power up and power down. Secondly, the heating in my house never normally exceeds 18 degrees anyway, because I find that plenty warm enough - so rather than a 30% drop, it is a 22% drop. But it's still very cold - and trying to type in it, as I have to in a bid to earn some sort of living, is not easy. 

I have three priceless advantages. I am young (only 25) healthy and active, and do not feel the cold as intensely as maybe an older person would. Two, and much more usefully, my parents live only a few doors away, so I can always go and warm myself there for a bit if I like. Third, and most of all, I am used to it, having lived in draughty and cold student accommodation for the last seven years. While you don't ever exactly get to like the cold, you can learn how to cope with it - keeping active, and eating less at one meal but eating more often, and making sure however little you eat, it's good and hot (soup is excellent, but baked potatoes aren't bad, and any sort of fish is useful - I'll be having tuna mayo and baked potato in a bit, for instance, and I have some tins of soup ready).

How it must be for say, a newly redundant member of staff from Woolies, who may never have been so cold before, never have worried about where the money for heating would come from, to be caught in this cold snap, I can't imagine. And they don't, so far as I know, get heating benefits - only dole, housing benefit and council tax breaks (although I may be wrong on that one). I feel desperately sorry for those pensioners caught in my difficulty without my physical resilience. But equally, I'll spare a thought for those who have the same problem, for the first time, at a low point in their lives, without the same amount of help.

 And incidentally, to discourage Vladimir Putin's self-aggrandizement, is there any way we could make him go without heating for 72 hours? In a Moscow winter, that would soon bring him to his senses...