Not Quite Absolute Zero.

I’m growing tired of sitting in front of the computer for several hours in my unheated house. My body core feels relatively comfortable with four layers on – which is the important bit – but my nose, hands, legs and feet are uncomfortably chilled.

I tell myself that Captain Scott must have been colder than me when he was trying to beat that bounder Amundsen to the South Pole. And I don’t suppose Shackleton was breaking a sweat when his ship got stuck in pack ice while trying to find the north-west passage. And a bunch of mad people went skinny dipping in the cold North Sea today. And then there was that night when I lived in another country cottage many moons ago. My wife and I came home from work during a massive blizzard to find the water pipes frozen, so there was no hot drink to be had until I’d borrowed a fan heater from the neighbour. There was ice in the toilet and bathtub, and when my wife went to bed with a glass of water, ice formed on it within half an hour. It isn’t that cold here at the moment, but it is September and there’s no heating on in the house so it still feels colder than I like to feel.

The thing is, you see, I made a rule for myself by way of managing the insane rise in the price of electricity. ‘You will not use electrical heating appliances until 1^st October,’ I told myself. I’m the first to balk at orders given by other people, but I’m a stickler for obeying my own. So here I am writing another boring blog post with cold fingers.

And while I was sitting here silently bemoaning my cold fingers, nose, legs and feet, the term ‘absolute zero’ occurred to me. This is the point, out there in the cosmos, at which cold is at its maximum. Except it isn’t really because cold doesn’t exist as an objective phenomenon, but is simply a term we use to express a perceived lack of acceptable heat. And so absolute zero is actually a point at which there is no heat whatsoever. It seemed strange to me that heat could be finite in that way, but apparently it is so I must be wrong. It happens.

And after I’d considered the concept of absolute zero, the phrase ‘a damson in distress’ kept running through my head, probably because I have an abiding fondness for malapropisms, and a chap needs something in which to take refuge (which I originally mis-typed as ‘refuse’) when he’s feeling cold and irritated.