Finding the chase and cutting to it

Oh no, not another depressing one?

Hey, stop that. No, I’m back on energy consumption now the clocks have gone forward…

Oh, all right then, though looking at energy prices, it’s not that happy-a-subject

Thanks, I think.

Like many couples, we sat down and looked at some of the changes in the last budget. While there is unlikely to ever be another deal like FIT (feed in tariff), there are some interesting things even if you aren’t in a Council Band D or lower house.

Like what?

Well, many energy saving devices and installations are now zero rated for VAT, please see Energy efficiency improvements including solar panels and batteries. Please note the first bit of the article is for major installations, like air and ground source heat pumps. There’s also the government article on the changes here.

While solar panels were often VAT free, there used to be a number of conditions, but these are now zero rated, full stop. Same with batteries, which were only zero rated before the last budget if they were installed along with a solar array.

As I said, our conversation at lunch time strayed into batteries and what we’d like to have as a result. We’d still need to buy a couple of solar panels to qualify for the zero rate, but they’d soon recoup themselves with the smart export guarantee.

Given our situation, it’s not an easy sum. The solar is very standard but our vehicle to grid makes our usage a little unusual. We’ve got the house tuned so we’re rarely using more than 310Wh, although that peaks for cooking, boiling the kettle, etc. So 24*.32=8kWh battery.

But the car changes all that! When the V2G is storing energy, we peak up at 3kWh, lets say that happens 3 times a day. While we effectively don’t pay for that electricity (we get the money back when we donate), we’re still drawing 9kWh over three hours. Much of that is while we’re generating energy from our solar cells, but still.

We’re also begining to be able to use our spare solar power to heat our hot water – saving us burning gas during the summer months.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy sum. Speaking of which, we’ve just got the barbeque out. Which should save a little more energy tonight, even if it is way to cold to eat out this time of year 🙂 and it is only carbon neutral.

I bought a piece of beef for Sunday lunch and the left overs are being made into burgers for tea tonight.

Have a great one!

I was born with misaligned teeth. Not by a great deal and not really at the front, apart from protruding canines at the top.

As a teenager, braces were discussed but at that time, aspartame came on the market and we soon discovered that triggered fits in me.  No aspartame, no fits: I also measure my proteins and ensure I don’t have too much phenylalanine from any sources – as this is the protein aspartame is metabolised as and while I’m not PKU, too much phenylalanine is not great for me.

Anyway, that put pay to the conversation about braces.  Fits and braces don’t mix.

Of course, the fangs were awkward once they came in fully and in my mid-twenties, I finally gave in and had them ground down which meant the permanent holes I had in my lip finally had a chance to heal…

Boring!

Sorry, just giving the background to where I am today: day 2 of my Invisalign™ journey.

Now, the clear aligners are removal so any issues with lows causing fits can be aleviated.  The trade-off is the time.  Fixed aligners (you know, the old metal fixed braces) would take a year or so to straighten my top and bottom teeth.

The removable aligners are a bit slower.  The process involves wearing the first set of aligners for two weeks, at least 22 hours a day.  The more I can wear them, the faster the journey.

Then that set will be swapped for a second set and so on until the last set is worn.  40 sets in total, so that’s at least 80 weeks or 18 months to you and me.

The aligners are largely invisible – they fix onto pegs on key teeth which allow them to do their magic.

However, any food or drink I have can end up sitting in them and being prone to infection, that means everything I have that isn’t water requires me to remove the aligners (top and bottom) each and every time.

My smile may end up straighter, but in the meantime, my teeth have been brushed so many times in the past 30 hours.  I am flossing twice a day too.

Of course, that should become easier as the process is performed, the idea is to create some space to allow me to keep my teeth cleaner too.

Wow – what’s it like

Early days to be honest.  It’s definitely doing something.  The early days of each set are likely to feel quite alien and uncomfortable.  It’s day 2.

I’m already better at getting them on and off for food and drink.  I may end up slimmer too, as the cleaning after eating is a bit of faff: light snacks are really not worth the effort, so they can disappear.

Same with tea and coffee, wine, in fact, I’m a new fan of water 🙂

listening to Radio 4 happily announce the launch of “the artificial pancreas” in the NHS.

I realise, I’m one of the 900 trialing this approach in the UK and it’s far from the freedom being touted in the article.

I got my new pump, a Tandem TSlim X2 with “Control iQ” on the 13th January and on the day I got it, my HbA1c was 5.6% which in layman’s terms means an average of approx. 6mmol/l.  Over the past few weeks, using my Dexcom, I have tuned my basal dose in my pump and my boluses to keep my glucose between 4 and 6.7mmol/l 80% of the time and between 3.8 and 10mmol/l 97% of the time quite often.  I still get highs, I still get lows but I’m in amazing shape.

This is not the same as being non-diabetic; the average non-diabetic is ranging from 3.5 to 6.8mmol/l > 98% of the time.  But I’m reasonably close with a target blood glucose level of 4.8mmol/l for corrections etc.  If I’m bolusing, that’s my goal 75% of the time (exercise changes it as does driving).

What am amazing thing to be doing, with the trial, I mean

I was looking forward to it.  I knew it wouldn’t be running as low, in “normal mode” as I do, but I was expecting it to spot when I was high (getting my boluses wrong) and correct round the edges and more importantly, pick up if I’m dropping a bit low.

Well, it’s done that for you, hasn’t it?

Not really.  First, I had that great HbA1c on a completely different insulin, which didn’t work with the algorithm.

So, a new insulin.  Which meant my basals didn’t work.

Shouldn’t be an issue, it will tune on top of the basals.  Only it didn’t.  After 7 weeks, I’d ditched it for running over night from about 9pm.  After 9 weeks, I’d ditched during the day too.

Why?

I don’t like running that high.  Full stop.  More importantly, I don’t want my insulin to be shut off when I’m above 7mmol/l, because it believes I’m going to be low in 3 hours time leading to my blood sugar being above 10mmol/l regularly.

It reducing my evening basal regularly meant I was being hyper more times than I could mention with blood sugar high enough to wake me in the night needing the loo and that’s when I could persuade it that my blood sugar needed to be below 7mmol/l to allow me to sleep!

It decreased my time in range against the levels I was given as a 7 year old and just left me feeling tired all the time.  A thoroughly miserable experience and that’s ignoring the fact it didn’t cope with different stages in my menstrual cycle – I had to manually programme them.

Did it at least protect against any hypos while running?

No, it was more cautious about correcting highs but that just meant I had to turn it off – the classic was when I’d got a bolus wrong and it shut my insulin off when I was above 9mmol/l leading to me being above 13mmol/l and fighting a hyper at 3am.  When I got it below 8mmol/l I turned on the closed loop only for it to not start “tuning” when I got to 6mmol/l which would have saved me from dropping below 3mmol/l an hour later because it deemed 6mmol/l as being “perfect”.

And that was before I caught Covid-19.  I thought it might at least help with that.

No?

No.  I tried for the first couple of days but it wouldn’t keep my blood sugar down enough to allow me to fight the infection.  That’s when my non-diabetic husband suggested I give up the fight and turn off the loop.

A failed experiment then?

Pretty much.  The worst bit is being on an insulin that is harder to correct highs with because it has a slower acting rapid onset.  Having spent the past 6 weeks tuning my basal, I’m pretty much I still bereft of losing my old pump and the freedoms it gave me.

 

The recent budget has brought a couple of interesting things with it.

The one I’m going to go through today is the 0% rating on the purchase of new solar panels.

Rich man’s game

No, wait, solar panels have come down in price, so while some of the subsidies have disappeared, if you weren’t buying a new system, a VAT rate of 5% would be applicable with little help outside of that.

There is help available via some grants to help if you are on a low wage.

The VAT break is important: a 4kW system would be around £5,000 including VAT a month ago, so that drops to £4,761 and there are other deals around.

That, coupled with the fact you’re saving on your electricity and getting the smart export guarantee makes solar tantalising.

Tantalising?

Yes, so for every 1kW we export that’s generated by solar, we get £0.30 back per kWh. That means we get around £1,020 a year back on what we generate. A really good year, that goes up to £1,080 which covers a great deal of the cost of the electricity we do by from the grid.

While interest rates are still low, this is a worthwhile investment.

Of course, we also get the chance to use that electricity – during the weekend, that means we don’t spend more than a couple of pence a day. All our cooking and cleaning is powered from our panels. Timing is everything and we do plan what we do when.

The great thing about moving to summer time?

Absolutely. While the clocks going forward is really hard work in many respects, being able to time hot meals, so they are cooked by the power of the sun makes it so worthwhile in reducing carbon dioxide production and of course, costs.

Not the whole story for you, though!

No, we also do vehicle to grid. That give us £0.32 for each 1kWh we export back to the grid that’s been stored in the car. We get around £700 a year from that, if we don’t use the electricity ourselves.

Some of that power has come from the solar cells, so it’s hard work getting a complete picture. But, it’s interesting that we can subsidise most of our power consumption with our exports.

Yuk, depressing!

What, no! I’m not talking about aging, I’m talking about the clocks going forwards.

Losing an hours sleep, everyone whinging, boring!

I take it that you’re still out of sorts from losing that hour?

Hump…

OK, well, this time of year is hard for anyone replacing missing hormones in their body. That hour is, usually, followed by longer days and less sleep full stop. Ironically this stress on my body just makes me want to curl into a ball and fall asleep but due to high pollen counts last week, I had the added joy of antihistamines.

Whinger…

Hey. While I have managed to get 6+ hrs most nights the past couple of weeks, it has not been in continuous, uninterrupted bliss. While I’ve had a “closed loop” pump, it was allowing me to go very high “to prevent hypos” which just meant I couldn’t get to sleep in the mornings. Fun. So that’s been off for a couple of weeks now, lowering my “go to bed” values and stopping the high alarms. I am back up to > 94% in range too (the 6% out of range is typically on the low side) – and if we count what non-diabetics have their blood sugar at, more than 97% with most of the out of range values being on the high side.

Oh, that’s confusing

Even 5 years ago, the common consensus was that “normal people” had blood sugar between 4 and 8 mmol/l when ever you test them. The widespread use of continuous and flash glucose monitors shows this is not true. A fit and healthy adult typically has a range of 3.5 and 6.7 mmol/l – the 3.5mmol/l tends to self correct without any undue harm.

The ranges for type 1 diabetics tend to be a little higher, 4 and 10mmol/l, for historic reasons – insulin has a parabolic action over a number of hours when given subcutaneously. If giving large doses of long acting insulin, 4mmol/l is borderline “hypo”. Though in our non-diabetic adult, it wouldn’t cause concern as their insulin would not be released and glucagon would be given until the values raise.

My glucagon reaction is there, although it’s fighting much higher levels of insulin over a longer period, so sometimes I need to give extra glucagon infra-musculy.

Still confused!

OK, so doing this myself, most of my values are within range with peaks during meal times or having corrected a lone at 3am.

If we look at 8:47am (just after I had breakfast), my closed loop system would have shut off my basal insulin (given once every three minutes to cover my background requirements) and waited until I got back up to 6.1mmol/l, which happened due to breakfast at 9:07am. That gap at that point in the morning would mean I was then hyper (above 10am) at 11am. To counter this behaviour (as I couldn’t alter its algorithm and decision making). I had put nearly 4iu on my basal at various times fo the day.

Having used the pump in open loop mode, my basal has gone from 42iu a day to 38iu and as you can see, my evening levels are pretty spot on. I had a late lunch and didn’t bolus quite on time, but that is a decent graph and an average of 6.4 – the closed loop was averaging 7.3mmol/l as an average.

The evening meal, which tends to be my main eating event of the day, was typically high using the closed loop as it was desperate to prevent a hypo and shut of my basal for up to 45 minutes after eating although you can see from the graph above that just didn’t happen.

Is man better than machine?

I think there are a few learnings:

1. The basal has to be good to start with
2. You cannot tune the basal with the closed loop going
3. It is much more proactive stopping hypos without trusting I know what I’m doing basal wise
4. I’ve set up the pump with my ratios for insulin effectiveness and carb to insulin ratios. They may be exactly what I use, but I also use the exception rule – different foods act in different ways and I balance meals effectively.
   I also understand that between basal pattern shifts, things need to be a little looser on occasion.

The really irritating thing is when I’m correcting under bolusing – not giving enough insulin when eating. It assumes you’re effectively overdosing and switches off your insulin when your blood sugar is high – doh.

When I do this myself, I do a differential – I wait until my blood sugar is back to 10mmol/l and then work out if I have too much insulin on board – the amount of active insulin in play and how long that’s going to last – if it’s 30 minutes, I may just keep an eye on everything but if it’s 3iu over 3 hours, I’d tune the basal or have a little corrective carbohydrate to ensure I end up around 4.5-5 mmol/l.

It’s not the closed loop algorithms’ fault. It does not have the full picture – indeed, if I haven’t bolused, it does a reasonable job. But it is not good working out, even if I tell it I’ve had CHO, that I need insulin after 45 years of not making my own.

I’ve been checking out what the upcoming change in the price caps means.

Electricity usage is going up by a third (so a bill today of £100 will be £133.33) per unit – the standing charge is then on top of that, for a 31 day month, £13.95.

Gas usage is going up by just under 75%, (4p -> 7p is 4*1.75) so a bill of £100 will become £175 and the standing charge is a max of £8.37. As this is happening over the summer, what is likely to happen is everyone moves to heating hot water with immersion heaters from solar power where possible. Immersion heaters are really good in terms of efficiency – using 3units of electricity to get a completely cold hot water tank up to temperature – at the maximum for electricity, that’s 84p. Do this at mid-day, using solar power which is what we do from March to October, and the savings can be huge – we spent £8 on gas (i.e. the standing charge) in August which is not the month we get the most from our solar panels…

Switching from baths to showers over the summer makes this a cheap way to make the most of energy use without too much bother.

Of course, I’m typing this as someone with an energy efficient house and not being penalised for having a bad credit score.

I’ve spent the past three years reducing my electricity and gas usage by insulating and switching technologies – not all in one go, but in small steps, the most expensive being changing 8 radiator value controllers for remote, programmable ones (£500).

But I could have done this one room at a time, reducing the bill to £60 a room, though there is a discount for the bulk buy. When I replaced the halogen bulbs to LEDs, I did this in stages to break down the costs.

We’ve saved more than 70% of our electricity use over three years, which we’re now enjoying relatively speaking and 30% of our gas use. Of course, planet Earth is also in a position to enjoy this.

Sounds great, how do I do this?

Electricity usage is easy – more efficient lights and devices, only 7% of our usage is lighting. Heathing is harder and there are three basic options…

Going smarter

If you haven’t done so already, changing room or zone thermostats can be ground breaking. A simple digital thermostat, the Heatmiser slimline, costs about £53 (this time of year) but can deliver significant savings if you have everyone out of the house for school and work each day.

They have four periods a day where you can say what you want the temperature to be. Cold over night, warm when you get up, cold while you’re away and warm when you get through the door. A different setting for Saturdays and Sundays and saving 20% on your heating is very easy to do. It can be overriden for holidays and high days (or working from home days), and for holidays to prevent damage from damp and frost.

We started our journey that way and using smart radiator valves, you have a winning combination for getting the most out of your system, saving up to 30% in combination. We still use this approach for two of our rooms.

Semi-smart

This is what we did with our upstairs – a series of smart valves on our radiators. Any number of scheduled temperatures over 7 day, 3 day or 2 day patterns (think everyday, different during the working week and unique programmes for Saturday and Sunday or a set for Monday to Friday and a set for Saturday and Sunday). You need a wired internet connection.

This makes for better fine tuning and savings around 25% especially when teamed with open window detection and geo-fencing. It is costly, but a one off cost of £50-60 depending on how you buy.

If I were renting a house with radiators, I would replace the existing radiator thermostatic valves with these and take them with me. Each valve takes 20 minutes or so after the first one is paired.

The whole hog

The next step after the programmable thermostat is the remote programmable thermostats, usually over the internet and there are various systems, typically £85 per unit and the need for a hub (typically another £25). Savings of up to 30% per zone done.

For a geo-fencing capability, you may need to pay a service charge annually of £24 but it’s not necessary to make full use of the systems.

Easy to do?

Not trivial, it just needs some time, patience and a screw driver. Don’t do when you need the boiler on full power to keep the frost at bay!

The use of a thermostat always gives you repsonsiveness against what the weather is doing – some claim to do that with weather reports but that’s unnecessarily complicated. What programmable thermostats do is go to the next level and tune comfort.

Would you go back?

No. I wouldn’t necessarily pay for the full geo-fenced automation but the comfort piece is lovely and seeing the humidity in every room with our system is a boom allowing us to reduce damp in some of our rooms with heat and ventillation: we’ve taken out 20% humidity. If windows are open, the heat loss is limited. It’s all good.

I’ve talked a great deal about how our heating works. In line with what I’ve been talking about the past few months, I thought I’d share our latest adventure.

Adventure, is that over cooking it a little!?

It might not be a terribly exciting adventure for many but it certainly burned up some energy.

We had an offer from our energy company to buy a wired thermostat and given 5 such devices in our house (every room downstairs has individual room thermostats and the upstairs hallway), I was keen to take them up on their offer. Only they were out of stock…

Okaaaaay…

However, this time of year is good in terms of pricing for heating system upgrades, so I bought directly from tado themselves and although it arrived last week, today was installation day.

Our boiler is on a separate fuse, I’d read and watched several instruction blogs and youtubes and felt pretty good about what I was doing and having put it on inside out (which made it incrediably fiddly), I got to the point where I switched on.

All looked good so I tried to get it to heat and killed a fuse somewhere in the system. Oh dear, or words to that effect.

We found the fuse in question, found a 5A replacement, took the thermostat out of circuit and checked everything was working. Phew, or words to that effect.

Of course, being a German system, once you have it talking to the internet, it is really helpful about telling you have it should be working and it seemed obvious from the much more detailed “replacement instructions” for our old thermostat, where different wires should go.

Did that, switched on again, all work, so again tested the heating. Bliss!

Out of interest, why bother?

Good question. I did replace one of the internet controlled systems with this new one, so on the surface of it, might not have seemed worth the effort.

First one

Is always the hardest, and took 90 minutes. Having done it, I’ll work through the remainder of the thermostats, one a month, until they are all done.

Newer system

Don’t get me wrong, our 2011 Heatmiser thermostats did their job but we’re living different lives and starting to travel a lot more. I couldn’t get the old PRT-Wifi for the non-internet sockets we had, so we were going to have to start upgrading at some point.

Having been impressed with the tado smart radiator valves, it made sense to stick with that company and a single interface. With this new zone thermostat, we now have 8 devices and will be putting a smart radiator valve on our new radiator in the ensuite.

While nothing lasts for every, the device I’ve chosen is their latest and greatest and when we swap out our current boiler, it should be compatiable with whatever we get to replace it.

Will the job ever be done?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t believe it is possible to get our house to an EPC grade A without completely replacing the boiler with an electric heating system and even then, I think that might be close but no cigar. We’re not 100% passive, we’re very good but completely passive is a different story.

That final step is unlikely to be cheap. We’re not keen on an air source system as we have too much space to cater for, and ground source systems are very efficient but much more expensive to install.

Who knows though. The future is not set quite yet.

For various different reasons, the UK is facing inflation of between 4.8 and 7% this year.

This is against the backdrop of a highly priced housing market and fuel shortages (if you’re a big energy provider), driving up the cost of power being delivered to houses.

It’s not uncommon for people to be facing increases of £100 a month for their combined fuel charges.

The average house in the UK is 85m², ours is nearly three times that at 251m², but we feel we’re sitting pretty.

The reason is our house is relatively energy efficient, it’s not perfect, but it’s not bad. We’re a high C or low B in terms of our EPC. That means it’s well insulated and using energy efficient devices (bulbs, fridge, cooker, etc). Despite being 3 times the size, we’re only using 75% of the energy of the average house in the UK to heat the building! Our electricity use is a little skewed as we have an electric car, solar cells and are doing vehicle to grid. That means it’s not easy to see what we’re actually using at any time – yes we have a smart meter but cooking Sunday lunch on a sunny day allows us to denote 6kWh over the period!?

It’s also meant our house’s carbon footprint is down to 3.95 tonnes per annum. The average in terms of heating is 2.7 tonnes and 5.3 tonnes for electricity not used for heating. Many options for reducing your carbon footprint will reduce your bills long term. If you’re bill has increased by £1,200 per annum, that’s a great deal of wiggle room to make small and larger improvements. At £10 a bulb for a remote controlled, programmable bulb is much more reasonable if it can save you £40 pa.

Basically, we’re some of the few sitting comfortably, enjoying the fruits of our previous investments. Just everything else to worry about…

We’re all used to hearing the slogan reduce, reuse and recycle when it comes to waste in general especially man made products.

When it comes to eating though, it all seems like such hard work and not necessarily that environmentally useful.

A different approach is needed, then?

This is an experiment I’ve been running the last three roast dinners and thought I’d share the results.

Principle 1: Cook once, eat many times

We’re buying bigger which does not sound that eco friendly, but doubling our “joint size” more than tripples our left over meals and reduces packaging.

For Chicken, we keep the joint whole and roast then make use of the left overs, more about that later.

For lamb, beef and pork we take a different approach. A 750-1000g joint can be cut into smaller sections. A good meal is 80g of meat each, so splitting a 750g beef joint into a 350g roast and two 150g meals and one 50g meal gives us three really generous meals – for us the roast on Sunday with sandwiches for tea. Stir fry on Monday with the 50g bit. Spaghetti bolognese on Wednesday and Saturday had two frying steaks served with bread rolls, onions, mushrooms and fresh veg. Or potentially using a portion on Saturday.

Alright for you, buying a big bit of beef, some of us our struggling…

Chicken is the most popular joint for a Sunday roast in the UK. Chicken does not directly produce greenhouse gases and it is still a high protein source for relatively outlay.

As a family, we roast it very plainly and serve with stuffing on Sunday. Let’s look at what can be done with a 1.75kg bird cooked over 90 minutes on a Sunday with roast potatoes and freshly cooked boiled vegetables (say carrots, broccoli, cabbage or leak and sweetcorn. We save 15ml or so of the vegetables and serve the rest with gravy and stuffing.

As soon as Sunday lunch is over, we strip the carcase of meat and reminants of stuffing.

The chicken is covered and left to naturally cool then stored at 0°C until a serving is removed for each dish.

Stock produced in the microwave

One of the issues with a traditionally cooked stock is the hours it needs on the hob, burning energy and producing CO₂. This approach uses the microwave and produces enough stock for a couple of meals.

A few freshly boiled vegetables are reserved and some skin off the joint as well as the bones and added to 500ml of plain water and some herbs and seasoning into a litre microwave bowl or jug. Microwave for 14 minutes over three slots, stirring each time. Leave to stand for 2 minutes then sieve out the bones and vegetables leaving a home made stock. We use half for soup that night, cooked while there is still daylight producing some solar power.

Monday: cheat’s curry

I love this as a lazy ready meal with a difference. Buy a great vegetable curry (Thai, Chinese, Indian) and boil your own rice. With 5 minutes to go on the rice, add left over chicken to the rice’s cook pot. Serve with the vegetable curry for a little extra protein.

Tuesday: rissotto

25% of the left over meat is used with the reserved stock to make a tasty chicken, pepper, baby or big sweetcorn and pea rissotto.

Wednesday: stir fry

Chopped vegetables or a premixed stir fry. Requires very little meat to be more generous than a shop bought ready meal.

Thursday: have a break

Treat yourself to something, anything different. All that money you’ve saved allows a take out treat. We often do fish and chips.

Friday: chicken pie

This requires very little meat and if using premade stock and pastry is really quick to make. Think chicken stew with a pastry side. You can put all the vegetables in the pie for a nutritous single meal that’s really filling.

Very comprehensive, but what about Saturday

We cook vegetarian: chilli or pasta or a soup. Or a burger from the mince produced from the meat for Sunday served with home baked rolls or salad. I make a lovely coleslaw.

If we have pasta at the weekend, it tends to be fresh reducing plastic waste.

Our approach means very little waste including electricity to cook the meals but means everything is simply produced at home while we’re both holding down full time jobs.

For me, the story starts in the Spring of 1992 when I got a phone call from my parents telling me the offer they’d made on a house had been accepted. I was living in Bath in rented accommodation working out what was next in my story.

The house had been built in the 1600s and was partially renovated by the current owners but it was a big job and they couldn’t finish the task.

What my parents got was a lot of furniture left in the big house: 254m² with a big garden and a lot of work which over the next 12 years they did. They down-sized and what they couldn’t use they left. That helped my parents out a little and in turn, as me and my brother left to make our own lives: us.

One piece was a small “gentleman’s wardrobe” from 1960. At 50cm deep, 80cm wide and 150cm tall, it had a built in tie rack, 5 shelves, a 3/4 hanging rail and two locking doors, one with a key. It was made by a company called Austinsuite who specialised in fitting Londoners with bedroom furniture just before the war.

Between the wars, it wasn’t uncommon for a “bedroom suite” to come with two wardrobes – a larger woman’s one to house her dress, often with full skirts, and a small man’s one. A dressing table for the lady would finish off with a little storage for jewelery and of course cosmetics.

Of course, for us in modern times, with all the pieces we have, it’s not nearly enough but being freestanding, when I moved into a house, I inherited it from my folks. Along with a tall boy, that lasted until we got to fit our family house. Then my son got to use the cupboard.

It lasted him until he was 13 and we fitted his room. At which point, the little wardrobe went in to the spare room for guests.

It was pulled in to full time service again when we bought our current house. Having sloped ceiling in a chalet styled house is very awkward but it’s narrow and short stature allows it to nestle. Again it was relegated to a spare room and now it sits in our upstairs lobby, providing emergency storage while another cupboard sits in the spare room.

But we don’t actually need it which means what’s next in its 62 year history? Do we hang on while my son decides his next step or sell it?

Watch this space.