Quote Originally Posted by Old_pie View Post
Memories of scraping pictures and patterns in the frost of the inside bedroom windows and one coal fire for the whole house - or in the days of student digs, one paraffin heater in the lounge for the 5 of us, no upstairs heating.

At least the toilets were eventually inside once we'd moved from my Grandma's.
Memories of putting warm pennies on a frosted window to melt the ice and just because we could. Bending a soft twig into a loop to lift dewy cobwebs off a hedge on the way to school, wearing a balacalava. And horrors! making a great big icy slide in the school playground which got bigger and bigger the more we slid(?) on it, all the while being ignored by the teachers.

We would make "winter warmers" out of old cocoa tins. Pierce small holes all around the tin, half fill it with rags then a small piece of burning coal (remember coal?) then more rags, thread a loop of wire through the tin and whirl the lot round your head to create a draught. Much more fun than them modern chemical hand warmers especially if a spark shot out and burned somebody, how we laughed.