Fog

Christmas travel chaos as thick fog sparks mass delays and cancellations at UK’s busiest airports

We're in the third day of persistent fog/mist here in our bit of Derbyshire. It's patchy as we found out on a trip to Matlock yesterday, sometimes more mist than fog and sometimes quite dense fog.

It reminds me of a short story by Morley Roberts. A very dense fog lasting for many days descends on London, so dense that people cannot even find their way home. People go crazy, break into shops to steal anything of value and even kill each other as law and order has broken down.

Couldn't happen now of course. We have cleaner air, quangos and progressive multiculturalism to protect us.

Sixteen pounds of coal a day

Whenever Maitland came to me I cooked his food and my own on a little grid, or in a frying-pan, over the fire in my one room. This fire cost me on an average a whole shilling a week, or perhaps a penny or two more if the coals, which I bought in the street, went up in price. This means that I ran a fire on a hundredweight of coal each week, or sixteen pounds of coal a day. Maitland, who was an expert in coal, assured me that I was extremely extravagant, and that a fire could be kept going for much less.

On trying, I found out that when I was exceedingly hard up I could keep in a very little fire for several hours a day on only eight pounds of coal, but sometimes I had to let it go out, and run round to a studio to get warm by some artist’s stove, — provided always that the merchant in coke who supplied him had not refused my especial friend any further credit.

Morley Roberts - The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912)

Roberts is describing his precarious existence pursuing literary ambitions in London towards the end of the nineteenth century. A shilling a week wasn’t much even for someone as hard up as Roberts. Viewed from this perspective, coal was a remarkable fuel available to all but those who were absolutely destitute.

Leads me to wonder how many of my ancestors survived winter only because they could get hold of a few pounds of coal each day. No wonder people scavenged it and risked their lives digging shallow and insecure mines where coal was reasonably near to the surface.