Most of us have spent a night, or a week, or if you’re a student, several years in a house with no heating. These structures are remarkable, turning the freezing cold weather outside into an almost unbearable tormenting ice prison inside. I have spent many a day in the house with no heating (in fact, I’m typing this with fingers that feel like 10 sticks of Captain Birdseye’s best breaded fish) and am now, after several hundred failed attempts, fully qualified in providing eight solid gold tips on how to keep your knackers freezing off during the yuletide months and beyond.

Hypothermia can lead to the building of weird snowmen.

Close the Curtains/Blinds

Open windows, double-glazing or not, are heat sapping panes of doom. Cover them immediately. Combine this with the scant warm of old-style incandescent light bulbs (almost certainly the light fitting’s weapon of choice in a house with no heating) and you can succeed in raising the ambient temperate by perhaps a third of a degree, just enough to prevent your nipples piercing through your clothing.

Exercise

There’s no better excuse for exercising than having to keep warm. There’s a reason it’s called ‘warming up’. Draw a track around your house, being careful to ensure it goes up the stairs. There are a few drawbacks to this approach - once the exercise is over, you stink of sweat, and that same sweat evaporates, carrying away any residual heat your body may have retained. This can be temporarily avoided by having a wonderful, refreshing, hot shower, but emerging from that shower into the icy dominion of the bathroom can leave you struggling to catch your breath. To avoid this, you would need to find some way of exercising forever. Not bloody likely.

Hug

The best type of exercise, hugging involves getting down and intimate with the person closest to you. Don’t simply go for the standard arms-around-the-torso hug. Be creative. Identify the coldest parts of each other and attempt to stimulate warmth around those areas. In other words, do the opposite of sex. Taking the time to get your hug right often results in supreme warmth, and sometimes in a variety of secret masonic handshakes. Again, the only downside with a hug is that it has to end sometime, unless you’re a siamese twin, in which case stop reading now because you’re set for the year.

Awh.

Layers

Layering is one of the great miracles of thermodynamics. Two sweatshirts, although they cover the same part of your body, are more than twice as warm as one. Think of layering as some kind of semi-retarded game. Challenge yourself to out-layer yourself on a daily basis. If you are what’s referred to in the politically correct climate as ‘morbidly obese’, you should be able to form a perfect sphere by the end of week one. Never be afraid to add as many layers as possible. It’s like having your own thermostat. Feeling a bit warm? Take off the hat. Feeling a bit cold? Add another pair of socks. By the end of the evening you’ll have a head like John Merrick and feet like Divine.

Leave the Oven Open After Dinner

A cheeky one this. Just because you haven’t got heating in the house, doesn’t mean you don’t have sources of heat. Crank that bad boy oven up to maximum power and nuke your dinner in double-quick time. Feeling guilty for using that electricity up? Don’t be. Leave the oven door open when your feast is ready for serving and sit in the kitchen. The residual warmth from the fan-assisted makeshift central heating will keep you warm until your belly is full and your body is ready to start shivering again. Important tip: resist the urge to place any body parts inside the oven. This can lead to things like third-degree burns, which will mean having to open the door to get to the hospital, which will mean losing any heat gains you got from the oven. Think ahead. Maintain composure.

Portable Heater

Sometimes, sod it. Just buy a portable heater, you can get them for less than £20 these days and they can heat a small room within minutes quite comfortably. Yes, it’s like running a giant hairdryer. Yes, your electricity bill will henceforth be measured in powers of 10, but feel the warmth. Other excellent sources of heat include the kitchen hob, the towel rail and the hot water tap.

Layers: they work!

Soup

First thing in the morning, grab a flask and fill it with soup. Not only do you have a guaranteed instant meal, it’s also a great way to get warm fast. A nice baguette warmed briefly in the oven is a cracking accompaniment. It’s also one of the most economical suggestions on this list, certainly more economical than the portable heater. By the way, if you have a portable heater and you’ve been running it since you started reading this article, your electricity bill is going to be roughly equivalent to NASA’s year-end spend in 1969. Turn it off and follow my final tip, it’s the best one of the lot.

Tea (Not Coffee)

Read the above very carefully, then re-read it. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to choose the right brew. Coffee might be the caffeine-ripped bodybuilder of the legal drug world, but it’s about as useful as a condom machine in a monastery when it comes to keeping you warm. You’ll feel great for about five minutes then you will experience a slow but brutal descent into the darkest depths of frigidity as the pleasant buzz gives way to a complete body-wide shutdown. Not so with Tea. Tea is the drink that built illegitimate slave empires because it kept the slave drivers warm. Turn to this imperial brew when the chips are down (or the oven is off) and it will warm you through for as long as you can keep that sweet cup going. Try my trick - fill an empty 2-litre coke bottle with a saucepan of the stuff. Only takes three tea bags. You piss like a racehorse, but it’s worth it.

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