I will never be Irish.

[mizkit]

I will never be Irish. I will never accept the idea that, as an Irish cabbie recently said to us, one keeps one’s house not so much *warm* as ‘not cold’. (This guy has a Lithuanian girlfriend. Only upon visiting her family in Lithuania did he understand why she kept turning the heat up in Ireland. “Of course,” he said, “their houses are insulated

Comments

[irishkate]

no no - it's not that all american's are rich in reality, it is why we tend to assume all american's are rich. When I was growing up, all american's had cars, and tvs in their rooms, kids talked on the phone to each other for hours. American visitors would tell us our houses were cold so we knew they kept their warmer (not something you could see on tv)

Some of these things were because there was greater disposable income in the USA, some because of the way the organisations were set up (local calls free...no one told us that..here hours on the phone to the neighbour would have bankrupted you). Some were simply that when you have a market as big as the USA, things cost less than in a small island market (though how that translates to Alaska I don't know)

Also - I don't know what it cost when I was a kid so I can't exactly compare but yeah, I'd say comparatively it cost more than it does now. For one thing, when I was a kid, central heating in houses was fairly new (here anyway). Some of my friends didn't have it til later. Double glazing was new, we got it when I was in secondary school.

And when you have grown up in a world where fires were used to heat rooms you get used to dealing with the cold - so when central heating came in, everyone thought the houses were roasting warm... It takes a generation or two before the idea that you don't have to (or shouldn't) wear a fleece over your clothes in the living room sinks in.

[mylescorcoran]

It does get ridiculous at times though. I remember a house in Dublin on Whitworth Road shared by a group of student friends while I was getting my doctorate. In winter you had to break the ice in the loo before taking a pee.