Haiku for the week

A shaded corner:

Spring sunshine outside teases;

Brutal cold indoors.

Christ, my new apartment is bloody freezing. I hadn't anticipated this when I moved in. My last two apartments were both pretty warm (the earlier one actually rather too much so, baking under a flat asphalt roof). And by the time the winter heating goes off in mid-March, the weather is usually starting to get reasonably warm. Even if it isn't (the arrival of spring has been badly delayed in the last two or three years, with nasty cold snaps recurring through most of April), those other apartments were somehow uncannily well insulated. Furthermore, they benefited from being south and east facing, hence getting a lot of sun early in the morning.

That's probably the key difference in my new location: I'm on the north-west corner of the building, and so don't get much sun until late in the afternoon.

In those other apartments, I also benefited from being higher up in the building and getting a lot of heat coming up from the apartments below. Here, I'm on a low floor, with only commercial premises below me (a teahouse) which, I suppose, are only in use for something less than half of the day, and not very busy even then. I'm not picking up much heat from the neighbours on my floor either, since I have two long outside walls, and one of the two apartments with whom I share a wall is unoccupied.

For the past three weeks, since the central heating went off, my apartment has become an ICE-BOX. It is invariably several degrees colder than it is outside (and it often hasn't been that warm outside!). I'm usually having to wear a sweatshirt (sometimes two) indoors.

Once it gets properly HOT in another month or so, I shall be extremely grateful for this natural coolness in my apartment (I might even be able to get by without using the air-conditioning?). But at the moment... I am shivering. Roll on, summer.