‘People are being economically penalised for being disabled’
on getting used to the cold
Spring “coincides with a chilling marker” for Brits this year – a 54% rise in the energy price cap, writes Lionel Shriver in The Spectator. Shriver’s “annoying eccentricity” – a “refusal to switch on the heating” – may “soon become standard practice”. The American writer’s “prescient cultivation of a lifestyle many Europeans will shortly have to embrace… isn’t motivated by environmental fervour. I’m cheap,” she writes. “I revere hardiness” and she is “seduced by the rational efficiency of bundling up individual occupants rather than warming all the spaces they traverse”. Shriver, who lives in London, has “never recovered” from the fact that her wood-burning stove “heats barely more than the sitting room” and “makes no economic sense”. So now she lives in “thermals”, “stained knockoff Ugg boots”, “a generous selection of indoor coats” and types wearing gloves. “As many of you will soon discover, the body gripes at first, but eventually becomes so accustomed to being cold that it gives up complaining”. She concedes that the “frail, elderly and infirm” may “have a tiny problem getting with the Arctic programme”, the result of “policies far more idiotic than my boiler boycott”, like lockdowns, and “see-no-evil UK energy planning – or lack of”.