Cold Vicarage Tips: Scarves

The Vicarage is cold. My feet are numb as I type this at lunchtime as bright Autumn sunshine streams through the windows but fails to warm anything in the house. I have many different techniques for keeping warm – lighting the woodburning stoves, feather lined slippers (not currently on my feet – hence the chilly [...]

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Unto Us a Child is Born: Seeing the Words

Following up from watching lots of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus in the form of flash mob YouTube clips over the last couple of weeks, the Vicar nabbed a couple of Messiah clips to encourage folk in church this Sunday. Here is the one that’s not the Hallelujah Chorus – For Unto Us a Child is Born, [...]

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Lighting the Fire: Autumn in the Vicarage

So it’s been getting a bit chilly here and we’ve fired up the wood-burning stove 3 or 4 times in the last week. So today I’m sharing a few thoughts about surviving Vicarage cold… Slippers We have new slippers in the Vicarage, both me and the Vicar. Warm feet make a huge difference to happiness [...]

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Sometimes Vicarage Chill can be Beautiful

The Vicar took this photo of the ice on the inside of the Queen’s bedroom window this morning. There was still ice on the landing window this afternoon. And most of the window cills are drenched with meltwater. And mould, but that’s my housekeeping for you. This picture is pretty though.

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A New Top Tip for Chilly Vicars

Before Christmas, we had a nasty shock from our power supplier, e.on. They wanted to raise our monthly direct debit for gas and electricity by nearly 85%. Although our usage has gone up a bit in the cold weather, we were still in credit with them. The Vicar had some long discussions with their customer [...]

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More Shed

The Vicar pointed me to a better picture of his glorious shed, this time taken from the garage door end.

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Keeping warm – the best way

You’ve probably gathered from previous posts that I think the best way to keep warm in a Victorian vicarage is to install wood burning stoves. These were definitely the top investment that we made on moving into our arctic home. When we visited soon after the Vicar was appointed to the job, we realised just [...]

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Some more thoughts on warmth

Cold vicarages seem to be a hot topic for discussion. Since I posted last week I’ve also remembered a couple of other techniques that we use to keep the frostbite at bay. Our electric blanket. Not yet on the bed but absolutely essential for later in the season. With cold feet I cannot get to [...]

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Keeping warm in the Vicarage – some irreverent verse

We had loads of visitors this weekend. It was great fun, though slightly bonkers. As ever, my Dad wrote some verse to commemorate the occasion. This one is about our first gas bill… Our new Vicar’s first gas bill, Would really take some beating. So rather than face the bankruptcy court, He turned off the [...]

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