Global warming is all my fault. And here’s why

Living in Norfolk, it’s difficult to be blasé about global warming.

Had I used a few less cans of hairspray in the 1980s I might have saved our county from becoming a modern-day Atlantis, our flatlands swamped by giant waves forcing all survivors to take refuge in a two-up two-down at the top of Gas Hill (for those of you not from our Fine City, the vertiginous Gas Hill is thus named because it has a gasworks on it – we are glaringly literal here in the East. Just don’t ask about the provenance of Rampant Horse Street).

I’ve always wanted to live by the sea, but I figured it might involve moving out of Norwich, rather than opening my front door in the Golden Triangle to watch polar bears floating past on lumps of North Walsham.

Global warming is like a religious education lesson come to life; senseless greed, disaster wreaking floods, hair-rending guilt and punishment from God by thunderbolts, storms, fire and ice. All that’s missing are a few beards, a couple of miracles and some oxen.
To cut a long story short, we’re all doomed unless everyone starts using energy-efficient lightbulbs and shopping in the organic section at Waitrose.

To this end, I have started growing my own vegetables.

By “growing my own vegetables” I mean that I’ve got a polystyrene box filled with musty smelling earth which has yielded a crop of three mushrooms. Bearing in mind the price of the mushroom growing kit, each mushroom I harvested was worth around £3.33.

I have it on good authority that the environment was struggling quite badly before I embarked on my mission to be self-sufficient. Follow my lead and we’ll turn back the tides yet.

nips like tent pegs, nose like an icicle and I haven’t even left the house yet

Just as I am built for comfort, and not speed, I am also built for warmth and not this bone-pervading cold we are enduring here in the East of England this winter.

By bone-pervading, I mean it’s -2C. And before anyone starts getting uppity – especially all you readers living at the Russian Vostok Base in Antarctica which is currently enjoying invigorating temperatures of -89C, 40C colder than the average surface temperature of Mars – the ability to cope with the cold is all relative, I’ll have you know.

It doesn’t help that I’m living in a badly-insulated, draught-filled Victorian shambles of a house with an extension clearly thrown up by Roy Rogers and Co back in the 1970s with its own eco-system and wind-chill factor of -30C on the most temperate of days.

The extension is, of course, where the computer is housed. As I sit here, ice pick beside me in case I need to chip away at some of the less fashionable keys on the keyboard (§ for example. Or \) which haven’t thawed out, I feel as if I’m typing in a morgue. And for once it’s not a metaphorical morgue which signposts the graveyard of ambition, which is how Jeremy Clarkson describes working in Norfolk.

Critics, or my family as I like to call them, point out that it doesn’t help that I continually cover all the radiators in the house with wet clothes. When I point out that the alternative is that they have no clean clothes whatsoever, they remain impassive. I’m good, but I can’t work miracles (or when I do, I aim for a better class of miracle).

By Tuesday night, it’ll be -4C. Yes, mock us all you Canadians who don’t wave goodbye to snow until May, but remember: we are British. The only temperatures we can withstand are those which are the very definition of ‘average’. This is not average. I can’t feel my bloody nose.