Being very cold

[Lightspeed]

MB thanks for the update on you local conditions.

Here we find that once the temperature is below -5C or so, its a lot easier to live with. Like Charles wrote, its the claggy damp near to freezing weather that chills to the bone and gets us down. This year we've had a lot of the latter, and the necessity of having to regularly walk the dog and tend to outside chores has forced me to experiment with layered clothing. Casting fashion consciousness to the wind, I've found that German Ex-Mil under layers to be good solutions. In particular a full long-john type furry-bear suit worn under overalls (This was designed for tank crews), and a winter lining for the standard battle dress jacket ( albeit worn under a Brit ex-Mil jacket) I still don't enjoy this weather, but these solutions make it a little more tolerable.

I agree about cold plus wind-chill searching out weaknesses in building preparations. You may recall that my place is long and thin and kind of built into the hillside with the roof gutter pretty much at ground level on the long western exposure. This creates an interesting phenomenon when its cold and windy from the West, namely that the roof acts like an aerofoil the positive pressure on the windward side being matched by an equal and opposite negative pressure on the leeward side. I swear at times it actually sucks the draught excluding out of the frames! Add snow to the mix and the aerofoil effect creates brilliant (not) snowdrifts on the leeward side:-(

All water and drain pipes to and from houses around here tend to be at a depth of at least 3ft. This seems to be a sensible precaution so the incidence of getting completely iced up is rare.