UncleEbenezer wrote:Leothebear wrote:So what temperature is your thermostat set to then?
Usually about 9 or 10 degrees. Keep the chill off (now that I can afford such things) in my old age.
Pah, what a bunch of namby-pamby softies. Berlin, early seventies, a fresh wind coming straight across Poland from Siberia, and minus 20 for two weeks straight. Just walking to the supermarket could kill you with hypothermia if you didn't walk briskly and wear a borrowed fur of some sort around your head and neck. (Most people I knew did just that. Even the vegans.
)
Indoors, I sometimes managed to get the temperature in my rooftop flat up to six or seven degrees, if my ancient coal stove could be kicked into life. But first I'd have to go down to the cellar and take a hammer to the ice on the coal briquettes that East Berlin had so thoughtfully exported to the land of the free. Each briquette was embossed with a hammer and compass, to distinguish it from the hammer and sickle on the Russian stuff.
Outside on the Wannsee lake, which formed part of the state line, the East German border guards were getting stroppy because they couldn't use their border patrol boats, because there was two feet of solid bloody ice. To say nothing of their two feet that were curling up with frostbite as they goose-stepped across the middle of the lake.
No wonder they called it the cold war. Tell that to kids these days and...... The difference, though, is that all of it happens to be true.
Happy New Year, all!
BJ
