The main source of heat in our home is a wet-back log burner in the living room. It’s fantastic at its job when loaded with tea tree logs and a load of dried pine cones. The fact that it is wet-back, means we save on our electrical water heating costs as well.

Recently, however, the log burner was out of service for several days while we waited for a chimney sweep to visit. This occured during a really cold spell in Auckland and I am forced to admit we plugged the small, pretty hopeless electric heater in. Its inefficiency meant we wanted to keep its use to an absolute minimum (rightly so, as, even after the minimal use we gave it, it still added $40 to our electricity bill!), so I came up with the following five home heating alternatives:

1. Do the vacuuming
By far the best, this one. You’re going to do it anyway, so it might as well be when you’re cold. Have you ever noticed how much heat those things pump out? Plus, almost as a bonus, you get your carpets all nice and dust-free!

2. Bake a cake
In my experience, ovens are pretty good at making heat. I’m not saying try to preheat it with the door open, but you won’t be disappointed with the heat that huge chunk of metal sat in your kitchen gives off with a pan of cake mixture inside. You can even boil the kettle and enjoy the cake once the work is all done!

3. Have a bath
Treat yourself to a nice, hot (warning: not too hot!) bath. When you’re done, leave the water in it until cold. It will help!

4. Exercise!
Now is the time to follow the government’s advice and do some exercise. 1000 press ups or sit ups ought to do it, but beginners can start at ten and see how these warm them. Hopefully you’ll be eager for more by the end!

5. Insulate things
Although home insulation is a great idea, I’m talking about other things here. Like yourself. Try investing in a fleece or some possum-wool socks and wearing those around the house. Put an extra blanket on your bed. Or maybe an extra duvet…

So there you go. Next time you are stuck for some heat in the home, give these a try and you’ll be sure to survive the winter. And become stronger for it too. And a better person.

A good friend of mine currently living the United States drew to my attention the headline chosen by the New York Post this week to report on the Iranian election crisis: ‘Turban Warfare’.

Obviously some little misinformed spade at the Post came up with this irrelevant pap some months after 9/11 and has been waiting for a ’suitable’ time for its publication for the best part of eight years. When turmoil erupted in Iran recently, they presumably ignored the advice of several more-educated interns at the paper and ran the headline anyway.

It’s a real shame for them, getting it wrong on such a grand scale. All they had to do was open an ‘Atlas of the World’ and look up Iran’s main religion to see that this headline wasn’t actually appropriate in this case. This is the level of research readers’ hard-earned money is put towards at good newspapers.

My friend in the States saw the headline on a copy of the ‘paper’ in a cafe. He left, having remarked, in ink, on the front page: “Racial Propaganda”. I suggest you do the same.