Vents and exits 7.
Somebody has left a dinner jacket (tux) and a pair of evening trousers on a
hanger hooked to the door of the Mind charity shop, which is closed, it being Sunday. What looks like cigar ash is smeared on the right shoulder of the jacket. But it should brush off if anybody is interested in using it right away.
Crossing Little Mount Sion, I meet D and A. D is 80 and is recovering well from a recent heart by-pass operation. He has felt the cold, he says, since he came out of hospital, but then it has been cold. They have just been out to lunch, they say. They switched off the heating to economise while they were out, which Denzil regrets. "Never mind," says A, "We'll switch it on again, when we get in. And in five minutes it will be as hot as the tropics.
3 comments:
The dinner jacket with its cigar ash seems to be a clue from a detective story - perhaps a Maigret. I was wondering whether a good forensic scientist could identify a type of cigar by examining its ash.
word verification: later
Lucas: Didn't Sherlock Holmes write a monograph (whatever that is) about cigar ash?
Some months ago I had thermostats fitted to the CH radiators and asked the plumber: "What's the strategy?" He told me nothing that wasn't obvious. However, sitting on the couch and listening to the furnace roaring away has encouraged me to devise a strategy all my own. That, plus a glance at my most recent gas bill. And going out for lunch can be something of a lottery; pub owners and restaurateurs have been forced into strategies which test the concept of hospitality to the limit. Perhaps I should be double digging.
I don't know about Sherlock Holmes or Maigret, but wasn't T.S. Eliot who displayed his forensic skills
with
Ash on an old man's sleeve,
Is all the ash that burnt roses leave. ?
We have proceeded on the principle (false though it may be)that switching off, and letting the house get cold, and having to warm it up again, uses more power than keeping it at a steady temperature. I don't know if anyone has done a study.
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