Multicultural Man: On coal

“I appreciate that,” he cooed, “but the ordering system isn’t responsive to the weather – only the calendar: I’ve got storerooms full of Easter eggs out back, waiting to be tagged and shelved.”

And with that, he reasonably terminated our conversation: after all, what else could he say to me, coming as we do from such radically different cultures. He wandered off between the brightly lit immaculate aisles lined with consumables and durables, limber in his relaxed-fit grey chino-style trousers and cotton-rich v-neck sweater; I stood, in my three-quarter length goat-wool djellaba, woven deep in the Rif mountains in the immemorial Berber way, and braved myself to face… not leaving the warm supermarket: we can all cope with the great outdoors on a chilly day, given suitable clothing – but although it was only 7am, I’d already been up for a couple of hours doing just that. Inside.

Why? One of the symptoms of my blood cancer is bad pruritus that responds very well to the top layer of the skin being, um, refrigerated. Luckily, I have loving and long-suffering cohabitants, and they’ve acceded to only one room in the house being properly heated for the entire day. It’s the central heating that really provokes the insufferable itching, hence my urge for coal.

In me – and after a few weeks of living with a gelid domestic environment, I’m not sure it isn’t an irritant for many others as well, albeit unconsciously. I’m old enough to remember what life was like before the generality of houses and flats were centrally heated – and now I’m experiencing it again.

You might’ve expected this to come with heartfelt reflections on a society that a) builds incredibly poorly insulated habitations, and b) condemns its most disadvantaged members to live in them, but while I’m entirely sensible to such suffering, the sad fact is that I’ve been enjoying life in the fridge.

So have the striped Barbados amaryllis that my wife bought from the stall outside Stockwell tube almost a fortnight ago: like the butonnières of some fin-de-siecle dandies whose era has never, in fact, ended; they are still in full anti-natural bloom. As am I: although I fully accept that since my new habitus is elective rather than imposed, it’s as about an authentic a return to the pre-1970s, as David Cameron’s to what we must, perforce, call the government.

I digress. Sometimes I order 25kg bags of coal online and have them delivered – bringing back memories of men, wearing leather aprons, blue-blacked with coal dust, and unloading grey hessian sacks of the stuff. But mostly I like to scour the shops and supermarkets of south London for 10kg bags I can bring back in the basket of my bicycle.

Cycling to Sainsbury’s to get a bag when it’s just opened has been one of my keenest delights; giving me, as it does, a bizarre sensation of eliding the medieval and the modern eras – for after all, what am I engaged in, if not gathering winter fuel from near the riverbank, like some peasant of yore; then carting it back to my hovel. Obligingly, the streetlamp immediately outside the house, which, with its bright LED array would rather spoil the vibe (see TNE passim for my opinions on this matter) hasn’t been working for the past week or so, which means that when I return, shortly before dawn, the house is cocooned in its own deeper darkness.

I once lived for a winter in a very remote house in the Orkneys that only had three coal fires for heat and an old coal-fired Raeburn to cook on – so believe me, I learnt how to make fires that are the carboniferous equivalent of nuclear piles. If it is indeed coal I’m burning now – I mean to say: how the devil do they make solid fuel smokeless? The very notion implies – to me at least – some sort of chemical additive that renders the whole business more environmentally damaging than… well, burning coal.

What I will say about going back to a chilly future, is that it teaches you in quick time that life isn’t all about basking in some sort of amniotic bath of synthetic warmth. And that’s really my main point: the temperature-controlled environments we, for the most part, spend our winters in, are just so many more technologically inflated bubbles.

It will be very brusque indeed when they pop.