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A Cold Introduction

4 December 2015

By Oisin

I’m Oisín Power, the newest B**p writer. I’m a first year student at Newcastle University studying English Literature. I live on the Wirral (which is near Liverpool) but my parents are Irish, hence the wacky name. This is the first of my weekly columns, so every Friday I’ll be writing about what it’s like to live in Newcastle as a newcomer and a student.

Despite coming from the Wirral, which is geographically in the North of England (despite what ‘true’ Northerners say), I am finding it difficult to acclimatise to the Newcastle climate. By climate I mean the cold. No longer can I leave my flat wearing just a T shirt and a coat; no, I can’t remember the last time I wore less than three layers, even when hitting toon for the night. I am forever stuck in a dilemma: to be warm outside but boiling inside, or to be warm inside but freezing outside?

I don’t understand Geordies who don’t need to wear layers. It must be so easy to wear the same clothes all year round; heck I see people still wearing shorts now! But we’re not so different; I’m (almost) Northern too, so why am I so susceptible to the cold? I have done some research and drawn three conclusions:

1) The heating in my university accommodation does not ever turn off. This is great for my bedroom which is always warm, but is grim in the kitchen, which effectively transforms into a sauna whenever anybody cooks. This has forced my body to adjust to these exotic temperatures.

2)Before I came to university, I did a volunteering placement with the charity Progressio in Honduras. Honduras is in Central America and is a really hot country, so I spent a lot of my time sat in the shade of my shack of a house simply sweating. My theory is that I adjusted to the Honduran heat, and never reacclimatised since returning home.

3)Finally, the Wirral is in the North West of the country, and it is a peninsula. Therefore three sides of it are heated by the Gulf Stream currents and so instead of being toughened up by the harsh winds of the North Sea I have been lulled into a false sense of complacency. A complacency which has been shattered since moving to Newcastle.

 

I would like to add that these statements have no scientific grounding, and so I conclude with a plea: how do you deal with the cold? Can I adapt or am I doomed to layer up forever?

cold pic1

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