"sarah" wrote It was 1982. We'd recently arrived from western Canada
and were living
in a bedsit in Surrey (large Victorian room with bay window, heated only
by a small 3-bar gas fire; shared bathroom and kitchen were unheated). I
have never been so cold in my life before or since!

Dec 81/Jan 82 was the classic cold spell for me living as I was in Durham
and we've had fond and detailed discussions about it on this ng before,
with diesel freezing, ice floes on the river Wear, frozen water pipes and
frost heave under my porch. The cold let up for Xmas, after being intense
earlier in December, but returned just after the New Year.

I don't recall it lasting as far into the month as the 14th, where I was,
but I think that further south did get it worse.

- Tom.