14 March 2023
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John Anderson
Russians know about cold. Try Lake Baikal in January!
They have a word, ‘dressing- gown-ness’ (chalatnost), which describes how they live in their country homes, fully clothed but with a dressing gown on top to keep warm. This was normal in England too during the last century: pictures of Sherlock Holmes and CS Lewis in the 1920s depict them in lounge suits with dressing-gowns on top.
We are rightly concerned with warm houses and Churches. But it is our bodies that need to be kept warm, not so much the building and air around us.
My wife, Ruth, and I have cold hands and feet. So we wear wool and our dressing gowns (or housecoats) around the house to reduce somewhat the temperature of our home so that we do not use too much gas, a fossil fuel.
Baildon Methodist Church, like Bradford Council and our national Parliament, has declared a climate emergency. Covid-19 has distracted us from the longer-running, slower and far more dangerous, crisis: global heating. Wherever we are, at home or in Church, to keep ourselves warm we need to wear sufficient warm clothing. For we all know the damage we humans are doing to God’s creation and particularly God’s biodiversity. The warmer our bodies are, the less we need to heat the air around us; this will save gas or electricity – not to mention money. We need to economize on electricity even if it is renewably generated.
So let us learn from the Russians. After all, one of the reasons why they defeated the Germans in World War II was because they could keep themselves and their tanks warm while the Germans could not.
John D Anderson