My house is so cold! It’s one of those red-brick victorian terraced houses that had no insulation because it wasn’t invented back then. Also, with a fire place in each room who needs insulation? Just chuck another log on.

Only this is 2008 and all the fireplaces have been bricked up, which is a shame. There is central heating and it does work, in every room except the front room, the kitchen and my bedroom - conveniently the three largest rooms in the house. Well I lie, the heating works fine, it’s just not enough to heat the rooms effectively and I think it’s down to the crap insulation.

I have a thermometer in my bedroom, the highest it gets up to is 16c and that’s during the day when the heating isn’t on! At night it drops to about 10c, with 6c being the lowest recorded (ever slept in your fridge?).

After coming home today I found a letter from the landlord saying they want to arrange a house inspection at some point. In anticipation of this I have done some tidying up. While picking up some random stuff from my bedroom floor I noticed this behind my chest of drawers…

Isn’t that nice! For the curious, here’s a closeup…

Needless to say the heating has been cranked up some more and the timer altered to run for longer. There’s also a fan heater whirring away up there now in an attempt to dry the room out. I think I’m on a losing battle though, what with the space under the house containing a large pool of water…

Spent most of today helping Amy tidy her new bedroom that her old housemate used to inhabit. Since her previous housemate was a dirty person with no concept of hygiene we decided to remove the carpet and put a new piece down. We also started stripping wall paper and disposing of quite a large stash of naked-lady magazines that he had been hoarding.

We have no idea what he used to do on his carpet, and really don’t want to think too hard either, but there were quite a lot of stains that had gone through to the underlay.

Once the carpet was down I set up a small fish tank that I’d bought. It’s now whirring away and has to be left alone for a week to make the water fit for fish.

To finish off we had a barbequeue in the dark and cold. It being so cold things were beginning to freeze by the time it’d got to the marshmallow course. Barbequeues always have several courses - the raw sausage starters, cremated burger appetiser, char…everthinged chicken main with extra soot and ash, followed by volcanic marshmallows.

Amy has a slightly naff keyboard, it’s a small laptop-style one with the only redeeming feature being it’s bright pink (not that I like pink you understand, but on Planet Amy, anything pink is good… no matter how bad it is ) And you know, the keys stick and she gets frustrated with it so I thought I could lend a hand.

Read on to see some photos of the progress…

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Today me, Amy and her mental dog went to Cleethorpes to do what the British do at the seaside - wander about and moan about other people not controlling their dogs. We also had a flask of tea, some sandwiches and, because Amy’s dog was wearing a backpack, many confused and amused looks

We must be one of the few countries that visits the seaside when it’s winter and cold. Nobody was in the water, but that’s only because the water was a mile away due to being low tide. Had the water been closer to the seafront, there would have been someone in it going gently blue.

School goes back tomorrow. I’ve worked out what I’m teaching for the next five weeks and have something approaching a plan. Hopefully the children will cooperate and my plan won’t require too much modification.

Over the weekend I went to Wasdale with my dad for a walk. We arrived to mist and a traditional damp Lake District day, with the view across Wastwater (Britain’s favourite view supposedly) not being too impressive. However, in the morning we woke to a nice dusting of snow on everything and a bitterly cold wind. I had six layers on and just couldn’t feel warm enough, I think I need some thermal leggings or something.

We set off up the path to Sty Head Tarn, from the farm at the bottom where we were staying. The path began with some slushy ice but that soon thickened into nice, crunchy fresh snow. The dog seemed to enjoy it, joining in with an entertaining (for us) game of “roll snow down the hill and chase it”. I even worked out I can take photos while wearing my big mittens.

We’d got about 2/3 up the path when huge gales and stinging shards of ice and snow began battering us. Not anything too serious, but since we weren’t planning a day in the ice and had a small dog with us we turned around and went back down the path.

And while plodding back down the slippy path I made the fatal mistake people often do on the way home. I stopped paying attention to where I was walking. Slop! I trod onto what I thought was a patch of snow, but soon discovered it to be a knee-deep icy pool of mud. There was a few seconds of dampness followed by biting cold as the ice and slush found its way into my boot and up my trouser leg. I used to go jumping into cold rivers, and it felt not unlike that. My foot did what it usually does in this type of situation and went numb so I gave up bothering about it.

I’ll upload a nice picture of Wastwater and write about it on my other blog in a moment.

My god it’s cold. My house is doing a fantastic job of being draughty and hard to heat up. The heating is on, the windows are shut, the curtains are shut… and yet it’s still not warm. I’ve even done the trick of tucking the curtains behind the radiators. I bet there’s no insulation between the floors or in the roof.

I woke up this morning to a cold house, froze my arse off getting dressed, and it wasn’t until I’d been sat in a hot computer room for an hour that I finally warmed up. Between getting up and being in that computer room I’d sat in my car for half an hour with the heating on full blast.

This theme of cold continued into my form room at school where the heating doesn’t do anything until about mid-day. It’s one of those situations where opening a window would probably make things warmer!

I think having a glass of cold water out of the fridge might have been a key mistake this morning. I might add half an hour extra to the timer on my heating, if I can do that without having to totally reset the entire system. My heating being designed by someone who hates end-users, it would seem. Do one thing wrong in the sequence and the heating either never comes on, or never turns off.

Bear in mind that I used to live in the Lake District or Scotland in the cold. I also used to jump into lakes and rivers wearing nothing more than a few layers of clothing. It’s that same persistent kind of cold - not cold enough to make me shiver, but enough to be irritating. The weird draughts that go around the walls are quite annoying.

School breaks up on Thursday at half twelve. My kids are making Christmas cards in Microsoft Publisher. It’s a nice, simple lesson to keep them amused and contained. This time last year I was getting the kids to make animations with Macromedia Flash. Kind of strange to think that a year ago I was coming to the end of my first teaching placement, and now I’m doing it for real. How time flies and all that.

Two weeks ago I snapped the chain on my bike. Today I finally got around to fixing it.

Before I could do anything there was the small task of cleaning the chain and removing one very broken link. Chain tools make this job much easier than it would otherwise be, but it’s still not that simple as a look in the bin in our bike shed will show you. The books and diagrams on chain repair kits make it look incredibly straight forward. I’d like to see it done with a manky oily chain that’s been wiped down with a rag, on a cold day done by someone wearing latex gloves that are covered in oil.

Once the chain was rejoined the laborious task of re-indexing the gears began. God this is a time consuming task involving resetting the fine balance between being able to stay in a gear while also being able to change to another gear. The bike does change gear now, although it won’t go into the highest gear as that just results in the chain trying its best to hop off all the time. I suspect the cable needs retensioning again. I’ll leave that for a warmer day.

It’s getting a little chilly outside (and inside when the heating turns off, or people in the shop declare that the front door has to remain open). Went for a walk up Skiddaw yesterday. The top quarter of it has a nice sprinkling of snow and a not so nice glaze of ice.

Armed with my camera and tripod, crampons and ice axe I set off. Since it was a Monday the place wasn’t crawling with tourists so for the most part I only had the constant whistling of the wind for company.

Yes. The wind… setting off from the carpark was alright, but as soon as I got onto the open part of the path before it goes steep a rather persistent wind tried to blow through my head. On went all my hats, gloves and extra layers. This seemed to be good until I started going uphill where I began to overheat. You really can’t win and have to accept being a little cold (if you accept being a little too warm you’ll sweat loads, soaking your clothing, giving you hypothermia when you stop moving and also making you really dehydrated). The wind didn’t let up either. On the top it was quite possible to relax the entire top half of my body and lean against it while walking, which is a really strange experience. Not as strange as being able to walk down-hill with my body 90 degrees to the surface I was walking down. Normally this’d make you fall over, but with the persistent howling icy blast keeping me upright it turned knee-bashing downhill walking into something as easy as walking on the flat

Quite glad I had such a heavy bag, it stopped me from being blown away. The wind instead tried to blow my skin off, which once it realised was futile tried to sneakily freeze my finger ends off. Stopping to eat sandwiches was fine with no gloves on, but before I’d had time to think “hmm, fingers are going cold” they’d done pretty convincing impressions of frozen sausages and I was half way down again before they’d got to the “burning hot and painful” stage of recovery.

Winter is here, and by the looks of things, it’s going to be a cold one. This is good Could do with sharpening my crampon spikes though, I spent a lot of the day walking across frozen gravel - not really crampon territory, but exposing my fingers to the wind was something I didn’t want to do, so they stayed on my feet. Someone made a comment about this, but then had that brief moment of complete understanding as he nearly slipped on some ice. Why take twice as long to slip and slide down a path when you’ve a pair of big spikes in your bag?

There’s a selection weekend in two weeks for next year’s staff. Unfortunately I’ll be in London, so won’t get to enjoy jumping in the ghyll. Shame, I was looking forward to being dunked in icy water for a few hours. Never mind, I’ll think of them while sitting in a warm, dry pub

Seems we’ve run out of sitework to do at the Centre. Following on from yesterday’s waterfall we went and did the Ghyll backwards. This, in itself, is no great deal and something I’ve done many times before on much more interesting ghylls. The best bit though was going into the “forbidden zone” between what we call the “top section” and the (imaginately named) “bottom section”.

In between these two sections is a deep gully with several large falls. The kind of thing we can’t take groups of kids in. It’s just the kind of thing a bunch of outdoor instructors can go in though

Climbing them was great. It’s not the same as regular rock climbing since everything is coated in slime. Knees come out, feet are planted on flat bits and there’s a lot of arm work involved. Occasionally someone falls off into a pool and then spends ten minutes determined to not let this little bit of rock beat them. Other, slightly colder, people decide to go around the side.

I took my camera in its bag to take some pictures and videos. We found a little sump under a boulder and I’ve got an excellent little video clip of Will pulling himself through it. I personally find the idea of going through submerged tunnels about as appealing as getting in a kayak.

Coming back down that section was strange. Some bits could be slid down, others had to be down-climbed, and a few parts required a rope. I didn’t do anything special with the rope, simply grabbing it and sliding off the edge. On the first drop this worked quite well, but on the second one the bag I was carrying began filling with water and my controlled lowering turned into a semi-controlled slide down the rope. Had my hands been dry they’d contain some nasty rope burns now.

In addition to this “middle” section, I’ve found some new ways to plummet off the first large drop we do do with groups. This drop is called “The Corkscrew” due to the way the water spirals around a groove in the rocks. At the top is a large flat rock which you throw the children off. Above this, around the right of the pool, is a higher ledge where the hillside stops being grass and turns into vertical rock. You can jump off this. Also, just behind the flat rock we use for child-launching, there is another ledge that’s set about two metres away from the edge. You can either do a running-jump off this, or just stand and leap off it. Either way, providing the jumper can go more than two metres horizontally, they’ll clear the proper edge of the drop and land in the water. I was getting too cold by then to be bothered trying, but the sight of their instructor leaping out the sky might interest one of the groups I have at the weekend

I need to learn how to do shallow dives. I could have a lot more fun if I was able to dive.

I have just climbed, scrambled, jumped and swam my way up Sour Milk Gill (Go through Borrowdale, out to Seathwaite and park at the farm as though you were going to walk up Green Gable. See the big waterfall on your right?). Compared to the other ghyll I did, this one is easier (supposedly being a Grade 2 scramble) but the climbing is more sustained and instead of there being one large waterfall to climb, there are several, with interesting slabs of slippy rock in between. The kind of slippy rock that’d make a great slide, if it weren’t for the certain death at the bottom in the form of boulders and shallow pools.

The water level was pretty low, once again allowing that wonderous Teflon coating to grow on the rocks. The slippy rocks make you concentrate more, crap yourself and hold on even tighter as your feet begin to ever so slightly move by themselves.

In quite a lot of places are exceedingly smooth V-shaped grooves, corners and channels that the water pours down. The best way to climb these seems to be to wedge a foot in the crack and lean on a side, then hope for the best. If you feel off-balance and like you’re going to slip, move quicker so gravity doesn’t notice.

I found a small leach making its way up my left arm, so I sent it flying back into the water. The cut fingers happened sometime when I was attempting to defy gravity and my vicelike grip on a rock suddenly shot off. Fortunately, for the entire rest of the route those fingers went kind of numb so I kept using them and didn’t notice the neat little slices in their ends (which match up if I bend my fingers in a certain way) until I was back here hanging up my wet clothing.

You see, these ghylls are all written down in guidebooks, just like climbs are. And just like climbs, you read the guidebook at the beginning and then make it up as you go along. So when you come across a large waterfall cascading down flat rocks, you tend to be half way up before noticing your route isn’t supposed to go that way. That’s when a little grade 2 scramble turns into something approaching VS as you shuffle across the rocks to easier ground.

And it’s definitely easier and more fun if you accept you will get soaked. Don’t pansy around trying to avoid the flow of the water, get right in there and fist-jam the back of the waterfall, there’s all sorts of wonderful holds hiding away behind the water. Just don’t look upwards or you’ll drown! Wet climbers don’t get hypothermia, you generate too much heat for that to happen. It also helps to treat this kind of thing as a rock climb rather than a hill walk, that subtle shift in your head means you look for things that are climbable, rather than places that you can stand up without holding on. The best bit is that you can pick your route, making it insanely stupid and hard, or easy, depending on your frame of mind at that moment.

This must make you a better climber too. After all, if you can solo up a 50m waterfall that contains slimy rock, no gear placements and bugger-all to hold onto, you can climb rock routes in the rain. It also makes you a more aware hill walker too. We got to the top soaked to the skin, I wasn’t wearing a wetsuit - just the stuff I’d be wearing if it were winter and I was out for a walk and we sat around for ten minutes looking at the view before walking back down the path into the valley. Being sodden isn’t that fun, but if you wear the right clothing you also won’t get cold and succumb to the elements.

Clachaig Gully doesn’t sound as insane and nasty any more. Maybe one day…