Diary #5: Cold news is old news

With record cold and an NHS crisis things can only get bitter

You may have noticed that it got extremely cold last week. Temperatures below zero across the country. Minus 15 in Braemar and minus 8 in Oxford. Coldest week in decades.  Perishing. Baltic. Brass monkeys.

Yet, curiously, the media coverage of the Big Chill seemed rather muted, confined to the usual extreme weather reports and warnings about burst pipes.  Far removed from the near hysteria of the fuel crisis this autumn. Remember the moneysupermarket guru, Martin Lewis forecasting riots in the streets. Perhaps I’ve missed it but there seems to be an inverse relationship  between the actual severity of the  weather and media interest in its consequences.

As I have pointed out here before, the NHS says that people should keep all rooms in normal use, including bedrooms heated to 18 degrees to avoid ill health. Over 20 degrees in sitting rooms. Well my meter is telling me that I spend over a pound  an hour just for heating my office, kitchen and bathroom. That’s £360 a month.

Houses with families must be spending vastly more.  Old people must have given up. Yet I’ve heard very little comment on this on the BBC. Nothing on the front pages.  Social media has been preoccupied by Elon Musk’s self-destruction and the Sussexes. Yet there must have been be millions of people living in deep freeze last week.

And even though the thermometer has recovered somewhat, there must be a lot of people who’ve yet to come in from the cold. How are they coping? How many have been cut off?   How many have died?

I don’t wish to be morbid, but In 2019, pre Covid, around 8,500 people died from the cold - or so Google tells me.  No - I don’t know how they can tell either but that figure is widely widely quoted and presumably true. But the numbers must be heading for the stratosphere right now.

Cold leads to increased blood pressure, strokes and many other distressing maladies including depression. Moreover, as the ubiquitous Paul Johnsonof the Institute for Fiscal Studies tells us, we are already in a weird kind of mortality crisis. There have been 25,000 excess deaths this year, and in summer  more were dying excessively than at the height of the pandemic. Now that we have a kind of cold pandemic, as well as flu and Covid, you’d think we’d be hearing more about it.

Moreover, the NHS is in a spiral of decline. It is failing to treat as many patients as it did before the pandemic despite getting more money, according again to Mr Johnson. This, plus the long term effects of Covid, and the lockdowns which seems to have reduced our immunity, makes this a winter of disease as well as discontent.

But we’re not even hearing the usual contradictory advice on how to cope with cold and damp.  Keep the windows open/keep them closed.  Heat every room/turn themoststs off.  Eat more/eat less.

I calculated that older people could save a couple of hundred pounds a month by purchasing one of those unlimited cinema tickets for 15 quid and spending 7 hours a day watching movies.  Not sure what that would do to the brain, but the body would be kept warm.

It is a problem, I think, that the media in general is, like the stock market, always ahead of the curve. It wants to know the bad news that’s coming rather than the bad news that’s actually here. The present is just a bit boring. Been there done that. Cold news is old news.