The weird thing about not heating your home is that you start to get used to it. I’m serious. The other morning I was padding around barefoot in a T-shirt. It felt fine. Not warm exactly, but tolerable. This time last year I’d have been cuddling up to the radiator in my dressing gown.

It’s all about expectations. If you expect your living room in winter to be like Antigua, you’ll start fretting about the teeniest draught.

My parents claim that the origin of this experiment lies in the fact that I was born in a barn. Well, not quite a barn. More like Perth Royal Infirmary. But I did spend the first few months of my life in a chilly croft house, breathing fresh Highland air by day and lulled to sleep at night by the bleating of the lamb that kipped in the living room. The midwife who delivered me thought that this was an excellent set-up, informing my mother before she left hospital that “we need to breed a hardier race”.

My wife grew up in somewhat balmier Kenya. She feels the cold. While she was working at home last week, her neck seized up. She went for a deep-tissue massage and the masseuse gave her a serious talking-to about her husband — and insisted that if she really was going to stick with him and this insane project, she must wear a scarf at all times indoors.

Love in a cold climate

Damian Whitworth continues his series charting how long he can survive without central heating

• Love in a cold climate: life without heating

• Love in a cold climate: life without heating

• Love in a cold climate

Background

• Love in a cold climate: life without heating

• Love in a cold climate: life without heating

• Love in a cold climate

We took the kids for dinner at the local Italian restaurant on Saturday. I realise that the way I rant on about how everywhere else is overheated could be getting a little tiresome for my nearest and dearest. But this place had heaters blowing hot air around the room so hard that it was difficult to stand up. I stripped down to my shirtsleeves but it was still intolerable.

I looked around at other tables, where members of a different species were eating plates of steaming food while wearing jackets and sweaters in apparent comfort.

At the risk of upsetting my fellow diners, I called the waiter and asked him to turn the heat down. He was clearly more used to people asking him to turn it up, but he complied. A few people looked over and started muttering to each other, pulling cardigans around their shoulders, but no one said anything. I refrained from saying anything, too, but only after my wife had told me that these people were trying to enjoy their dinner; they didn’t want a lecture from the local nutter.

As soon as the hot air stopped billowing out of the heaters, cold air came whistling in through a gap the size of Cheddar Gorge in the window frame.

“Wow!” said my wife.

“Just a bit of a draught,” I said.

The next day my right eye was swollen and weeping. For two days I could hardly open it and glared at the world through my good eye like a Cyclops — especially at those who came to the idiotic assumption that it had anything to do with sitting in a draught.

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