Hot or cold?

often just nicer to code out front in the shady part

I feel like I ought to add, with the recent blast of cold, it’s about 4°C in the living room/kitchen (actually got down to ~1.4°C), and thanks to a change of wind, it’s 11°C outside.
I’d open the doors and windows, except night tends to bring all sorts of unwanted guests.

It’s 9°C in my bedroom. I’m nice and snug with a Horlicks and a heated blanket. I am finding that I sleep better at a temperature (~7 to 12) that most people would find intolerable.

Knew a guy a few towns over who had a dinky little cottage. It was split up as living room on one side, kitchen on the other. There would be a roaring fire in both, in order that he and his wife walk around in T-shirts and flip-flops in the middle of winter. It was awful. I literally had to make my apologies and leave. I’ve had baths colder than that place was. Yikes.

I blame boarding school, had a glass by the bed with water, it would ice up during the night as keeping the window open in winter was “make a man out of you” crap.
Speaking of which, it was expected to do P.E. in shorts and a short sleeve rugby shirt when there was snow on the ground. One does not simply wear a track suit unless one wishes to have massive amounts of mockery, mostly from the teacher.
(of course, we’ll gloss over the teacher staying behind in the changing room next to a bottle gas heater flicking through Playboy while we ran around the woods freezing our arses off)

Oh, and bathing for the junior end of the school took place at a proscribed time on a proscribed day. Just hope when it was your turn was when the water heater deigned to make the water warmer than a forgotten cup of tea (in other words, not quite cold but colder than lukewarm).

It’s a wonder we didn’t all drop dead, really. ;)

Speaking of which, it was expected to do P.E. in shorts and a short sleeve rugby shirt when there was snow on the ground.

…when the PE teacher was wearing multiple layers, including tracksuit top/bottoms (over normal gear) *and a thick quilted coat.

Which I pointed out meant he was “a bit of a jessie” (to use his words)¹ – next stop headmasters office (warm), full, truthful explanation, next stop where I had been, with a note from the head which caused said over-dressed oik to bring everyone inside.

¹ OK, perhaps not the most tactful approach, but stupid, intractable beasts need a bit of pressure and this one was easy to manipulate if you did that kind of thing. Some years later (still at school, just) he spoke and suggested that he thought I might have been deliberately winding him up. Yep, years

night tends to bring all sorts of unwanted guests

Yeah, have that problem too! Mostly bats in the summer, just as you’re about to head bedwards.

It’s 9°C in my bedroom

It got down to that t’other week here when my heating failed for 36 hrs. Any cooler and I’d have had another duvet on the bed.

Mostly bats in the summer, just as you’re about to head bedwards.

http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/RatsCatsBats.html#Bats

“a bit of a jessie” (to use his words)

Hehe, it’s comical to think that “you are a girl” is about the worst insult the teacher could throw at a bunch of twelve year old boys.

He did once try telling me that I’d be a failure and never amount to anything if I wasn’t able to run around in some arbitrary time.
I told him that may be so, but I guess I could always find employment as a PE teacher.
Said it completely deadpan. I don’t think he cottoned on.

Going to “the head” was no good. To get to him you had to make it through the prefects, and since it had recently been made illegal for the staff to inflict corporal punishment, they tended to turn a blind eye if the prefects did it for them. At least a teacher giving you six of the best would stop at six, not scream manically while whipping somebody unconscious. Sometimes somebody just punished random people because they were bored. Should I mention that more than a few were “sons of trustees”?

At least an “event” ¹ happened when I was in… second form I think, or was it third?… that cleared out most of them and the head. PE teacher stayed, but then he’d never find a job dealing with anything resembling reality. ;)

¹ My blog → SIBA stories under the calendar on the right → third story “Dalliances”; it’s a dramatisation with far too much truth for comfort. Amusingly it begins recounting some of what I said above. ;)

Hmmm… At some point in either Year 8 or Year 9 (that’s 2nd and 3rd year seniors for all the crusties) I came to an “understanding” with the PE teacher.

Essentially it boiled down to this. I liked him as a person. He was a genuinely nice guy. But I was absolutely hopeless at PE. (Except maybe for the 100m sprint, experience gained from being the smallest kid in the school until the beginning of Year 7 I guess.)

So the understanding we came to was that:

1. I was useless at PE, and hated it with a passion.
2. The music room was off the gym (don’t ask!).
3. I had a key to the music room, as a ‘trusted person’.
4. As useless as I was at PE? Well that’s how good I was at music.
5. Therefore, turn up, get my head counted, and bugger off to the music room for a couple of hours.

On school sports days? I got put in charge of the PA and background music.

I think this was the only time during my school years that I’ve ever genuinely liked a PE teacher. For not making me take his classes!