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Terry Prone: Despite battling conditions in a Martello tower, the cold snap won

Being without central heating oil in advance of the recent cold weather proved challenging to our columnist

Mon, 13 Jan, 2025 - 01:00

Being frozen rigid despite wearing three jumpers is what you might expect during the cold snap.

The problem was when that condition established itself three days in advance of that snap.

I looked at the wall behind which the boiler lives, that wall housing a chimney thing out of which steam pours when the heating is on. No steam.

“I thought I asked you to check the oil?” I wrote in a text to Bryan, who takes care of stuff like that for me.

Despite the accusatory tone, which in fairness wasn’t that easy to detect in a text, he came back promptly and positively.

“You did,” he confirmed. “And I did.”

“You did?” I snarked, feeling like a straight man in a bad comedy act.

“I did and it needed changing, so I took the car to the garage and got fresh oil into it,” he replied.

You can see why he’s my hero. You can also see why I had a brief desire to text him in capital letters that he SHOULD HAVE BEEN INSPIRED THAT WHEN I TALK OIL, I MEAN CENTRAL HEATING OIL.

Although, to be honest, the car oil had been there so long, it definitely needed changing.

But honesty was not going to solve the problem of my blue fingernails and visible breaths indoors.

I explained the problem, and within an hour, Bryan had not only arrived with enough containers of oil to give me an overnight burn but had also ordered a tankful of oil, which would arrive the day the cold snap was due to start.

A definitive hero.

The oddity of a Martello tower, like the one I live in, is that the nine-foot thick stone walls seem to harbour and preserve cold.

That contained concentrated cold competed with the cold snap and — at least for the first 36 hours — the cold snap won.

Despite going around the house layered like a Michelin woman, despite the wood-burning stove roaring all day and in spite of drinking even more hot coffee than usual, I was still slowed down by the cold like a lizard when the sun disappears.

Now, my situation was nothing to complain about, when compared to the situation so many people experienced around the country as the snow fell and confined them to their homes.

The oddity of a Martello tower is that the nine-foot thick stone walls seem to harbour and preserve cold.

The pictures began to appear of farmers using tractors with diggers at the front end, helping to clear roads and driveways, and of young folk in wellies with spades doing the physical version of the same thing.

It was interesting, all the same, in those early cold days, to compare my situation with the only folk, in the 19th century, to live in this Martello tower during the winter.

The lads involved constituted something called the Preventative Water Guard, which addressed smuggling, for which the cave-rich coastline of Portrane was uniquely suited.

The Preventative Water Guard was a temporary body (think Nama) designed to halt the smuggling gallop.

We can’t find evidence that they were widely distributed within the Martellos of the time, which would have been intact, whereas now half of them are ruins, but we so know they briefly occupied the one in Donabate.

We also know they were drawn from an available cohort of invalided soldiers. Lads who had literally been in the wars and who, consequently, were now missing an eye, or an arm, or a leg.

Unimaginable, the suffering which would have been inflicted on these poor damaged ex-soldiers by what we now call a cold snap.

Especially because trees don’t grow out here and so fuelling the open fire must have been a challenge. Going outside for kindling must have been hell.

Flinging the cat out to the garden

Trust my cat on this; Specs decided that the outdoors was a bad idea, to such an extent that I had to lift and fling her in order to persuade her that she needed to perform her urinary duties in the garden.

By day two of this particular snap, at least I was surrounded, inside the house, by heat.

Adding blow heaters to the central heating and the woodburning stove was not going to make the next ESB bill pretty, but to hell with that, was my thinking.

You never know the day nor the hour a power cut will come along, although in this case, power cuts happened all around the country, but north Dublin was fine.

We did lose water for the second last day, but the authorities let us know in more than enough time to fill jugs and bottles.

And we didn’t get snow. We had gloriously sunny days, on one of which I drove my car.

Having cleared the windscreen, I was mystified by the ice still obscuring my vision, and sat for a while on the drive, trying the windscreen wipers, which were so markedly ineffective that I slowly copped on that the ice was on the inside of the windscreen.

Hadn’t seen that before, and it was that ice that made me think of the fish pond.

I must see to the goldfish, I thought, and set off with a long metal pole, walking on the grass rather than on the ice-shiny paths.

I considered the walk-like-a-penguin proposition but rejected it. I had enough problems without trying bird-mimicry.

The fishpond was in a serious condition, lying silently under sheeted ice so thick you could have skated on it.

One end of it was less frozen than the other, so I started there, poking the smooth sheet of ice until I got cracks and then breakage.

After that, it was down on my knees to try to lift sheets of ice up, using hands protected by rubber gloves.

At no stage did I see a goldfish, and by the time the task was complete, I was so cold I wouldn’t have cared if the Loch Ness Monster had appeared in the ice-free shallows. That had to be done on three mornings.

On Friday, I decided I wasn’t up for it, that the thaw was already taking hold and I needed to take care of the room where a roof leak had turned the floor into a paddling pool and reached a surface where two new books bought as a birthday present for a good friend sat.

Nothing is more sadly sodden than a paperback in the path of a roof leak. But that’s the extent of it and books can be replaced.

Nobody died or even broke a hip, despite a refusal to walk like a penguin.

A cold snap in an old building is labour intensive in a 19th century way. It absorbs time, which, right now, is not a bad thing.

The alternative is pointless worrying about the incoming US president’s designs on Greenland. or Canada.

Poking holes in the ice over a fishpond has its satisfactions. At least compared with observing global craziness getting worse, every day of what is still a brand new year.

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