Thursday 8 January 2009

Cold nights in Spain

Well... I'm beginning to think we might as well be back in the UK.

Ice on car

The weather here in Spain is pretty vile at the moment. Perishing cold, wet, overcast - you name it, it's here. The car was iced over at 21:30 last night - and I was scrambling around in the dark trying to find things to wrap around exposed pipes on my above-ground, 3000 litre, water deposit, (it's there because we suffered the water being cut off so many times when we first arrived).

This morning I purchased pipe lagging and was fitting it in driving, icy, sleet - not very funny!

The problem is, villas over here aren't insulated like houses are in the UK and winter can be damn cold. You can't even get into the roof-space to lay insulation. The floors are either marble or ceramic tiles (the builders think it's summer all year round), so we lay rugs wherever we can.





We have a high efficiency woodburner which helps out - in fact I love it - but it doesn't compensate for the fact that the rest of the rooms are cold. We have central heating, but bottled gas makes it very expensive to run, so we only have them on in the evening.

Weak financially

The Euro is so strong against the pound that it's now one-for-one, which means I've had a 20% cut in finances PLUS the cost of living is up, so I'm effectively 25% to 30% worse off compared to this time last year - so all in all, the UK is looking quite attractive at the moment....


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End of post - Cold nights in Spain

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