One thing I feel I have not yet grasped about Seaside Living is how cold it is. I mean: it is South, no? It is more South than London? South equals closer to the Equator, etc, but also, it’s only forty miles South, so it’s going to be the same temperature as at home.
(Home, at least theoretically, and at least for now, being the city in which I was born and lived my entire adult life.)
At worst, I thought, it would be the same as London in the rain slash sleet, and at best, we would be forty miles closer to the Equator, i.e. forty miles warmer. Also, I like seasides best in the rain! I like the sea in the mist and driving rain! And so I had not given the weather, really, much thought.
But my God: you cannot believe how cold it is outside of South London’s tangle of close-knit packed-in red brick streets. I mean, you probably can. You probably have not spent the last ten years living in such rich dense people-soup. The population density of Lewisham is 8,500 people per square kilometre; and the average population density of all the land in the world is a humble fifty-three. That is more dense than Singapore, for God’s sake, and all those bodies keep one cosy, and the tall red houses keep the wind corralled.
And also now there is nothing between us and the sea. I mean when I step outside of the front door I can see the serried and alien-beautiful ranks of wind turbines, forty miles offshore, turning and turning, and the wind that turns them comes straight across the waves to us. And the wind is cold.
When we got here we made one doomed expedition to the pub before we had to dig for the ziplock bag of gloves and scarves that I had optimistically stashed low down in the Unpack Priority List. It’s coats, it’s hats, it’s wearing a thermal vest and having a hot water bottle on your lap when you type. (Blankets, jumpers, big socks go without saying.)
It is also maximum cosy on the dinner front. I am always on the hunt for cosy dinners that take no more than half an hour to make (due to my many problems and all-consuming need to sit on the sofa clutching my hot water bottle watching Poirot and writing newsletters). Believe me when I tell you: this one is what we may cheerfully call a humdinger. You will never have experienced cosy like it: Asian carbonara ramen? I would go to the end of the earth for such a thing.
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