This might be the year to give or receive a chunky sweater at Christmas for warmth.
Not a novelty Xmas jumper – a proper plain pullover knitted in the Aran Islands or a polar bear coloured polo neck made for submariners and merchantmen on Arctic convoys. I feel the cold more now and keep the heating on at 65 all day. As a child I was impervious to the cold at Barmeath and Castle Park. When my best, only, school friend asked me to stay in a fashionable purlieu of Dublin I felt sick because their house was so hot. He has not revealed how he made out at Barmeath – except he mistook my grandfather for a gardener. He was gazing out of the dining room window at breakfast as my grandfather was taking the rain gauge. To be fair my grandfather was shabbily attired a la Lord Emsworth.
This is a digression, click bait maybe, because you wouldn’t want to read if you knew what’s coming up. In Coffee with Hitler and the Channon diaries there is a high incidence of jumpers – people, usually male, jumping suicidally out of windows. I can sort of understand an urgent need to end one’s life but jumping out of a window seems a strange solution. The “jumpers” I have read about were affluent. In those days cyanide was available – at least if you might be taken prisoner in WW II or were a senior Nazi. If you are interested in the former read Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941 – 1945 (Leo Marks, 1988).
Now something to cheer us up. Jump around but stay away from the window.