Wokery gone mad

We joined the housing set at the end of the '60's and discovered a need to upgrade every few years or get left behind.

Duvets are fine until you start to get old, because they require your body to be able to adjust its heat output so you don't overheat in bed. Later in life this becomes harder, so we use a thin duvet, fine for summer but which gets supplemented with a proper eiderdown in winter.

Making a bed with a duvet is nice and simple compared to having a sheet, blankets, and perhaps also an eiderdown.

We were encouraged to go to Measles parties to catch the damm disease which we did it seemed to have worked!...

In article snipped-for-privacy@candehope.me.uk>, charles snipped-for-privacy@candehope.me.uk> scribeth thus

Ice on the water how ever did we survive it was in the loo too thin film of ice and the times i was sent into he loft with a paraffin blowlamp to defrost the pipes most did have some cloth based insulation wrapped around them and this wasn't just the winter of 1963 either!..

As bad as what that was..

Heating! You were spoiled!, we just had a bath in the tin tub in front of the fire place then straight up to bed with the luxury of a hot water bottle!!!

An electric fire in a bedroom?

Luxury...

There were coal fire grates in ours. And using them was severely frowned upon by those responsible for paying for coal.

A female acquaintance worked in Selfridges in the 1970s. On a trip to London circa 1975, I was having a drink in a Duke Street pub with her and some of her colleagues when one of them mentioned "continental quilts", newly in stock at the store. Intrigued, I asked what they were and had the full ten minute explanation. The term "duvet" didn't feature within it - that was a year or two later.

One unforgettable sight in Switzerland, Austria and southern Germany is duvets being aired in fine weather by being draped over upstairs balconies.

At a guess, the state of the art was not so advanced as to allow oral administration. The pharma companies were on the case, though.

I can't be as authoritative as I'd like on the exact answer to your question, but in 1976/1977, the earnings for my tax return were circa £3,000 net of business expenses, but subject to tax and NI. So probably about £45 a week net.

Perhaps less (a little less) would have been enough. I was living alone, so there was no second income to be TIA.

I don't heat my bedroom, nowadays. It gets the heat from downstairs and I have an electric blanket.

I don't get cold?

I can go one better how about an outside loo? You certainly did not hang about doing your business. We did not have a TV until the late 50’s and

Richard

Not necessarily if you think about the possible permutations involving two men :-)

When they married, my parents moved into my maternal grandmother's house (1949). She made her dining room into a bedroom, and retained the living room as is. Parents used the largest bedroom as theirs (and mine, initially) and the smallest one as a kitchen. Last bedroom was our living room. There was a bathroom/toilet which we used, gramdmother just for baths. She had an outside loo which connected to the house by several stone steps and a draughty glazed area. This also had an 'outhouse' for garden equipment, single brick of course.

Father later split the big bedroom into a small kitchen and a smaller bedroom for parents; the smallest bedroom was fitted with bunk beds for my brother and me.

Only the two living rooms had fires.

Sister was born when I was six. When she had grown a bit, grandmother extended the 'outhouse' by a few (single brick) feet, and that became the bedroom for my brother and I; sister got the indoors bedroom. It was

I never understood why so many old houses had grates in the bedrooms. All right if you had a servant to lay the fire I suppose. In theory the fire was lit if you were ill; but I was never ill enough for that - I only remember measles when I was five.

Houses built in the fifties and sixties only had a fireplace in the main living room.

Did these "continental quilts" have removable covers? (That's how they differ from eiderdowns, which don't, and the latter don't droop down the sides of the bed, and you don't sleep next to them.)

That was more common than you might think. There were hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of houses which answered the description of not having indoor plumbing of any sort (including bathrooms with indoor toilets) other than a single cold tap in the "back kitchen" or scullery. Over a lifetime (so far!), I have spent about eight or nine years in such accommodation. It was one of those things you just had to accept. There were a lot of other people in the same boat and much of the housing stock in that category was never going to be improved because it was condemned and just waiting to be demolished (which most of it now has been).

There was no central heating or double glazing in the first (Lancashire) house I bought (built only in 1973) or in the Home Counties apartment (built 1961) I bought next. We have had central heating in every subsequent house. And double glazing. But I was in my late thirties before we had those.

I've long noticed that some people are more / less affected by cold temperatures (or hot weather, for that matter) than others are.

It's some decades since I possessed a hot water bottle, but around this time of year, they were at one time regarded as de rigeur.

It was the only practical way of heating the rooms!

Yes - an apartment I once had had a fireplace in the living room, but not in any other room. Even that grate was blocked by the installation of a gas fire.

Sixty-ish years ago, I sometimes - but only sometimes - had a small coal fire in my bedroom in the depths of winter for the purpose of doing my homework (when I could be bothered). Early 1963 in particular.

Oh yes, that's the whole point of them. People point to the absence of need for top sheets, but the cover is the sheet!

When my wife arrived on the scene, she was the one who initiated the swap to CQs/duvets. Before that, I'd been using top sheets and blankets.