Wrap up, switch off for the recession, says Isabel Morton

WITH ALL the talk of rising fuel and food prices, unemployment and the recession in general, I wonder have we all forgotten exactly what it was really like in the days before Riverdance, the Lotto, the euro and the Tiger.

Unfortunately I am old enough to remember scraping the ice off the inside of my bedroom window in order to inspect Gonzaga boys on their way to school. Neither electric bar heaters nor Super Sers could warm up my room which had two exterior walls.

There was a radiator in every room in the house, but they were rarely turned on for long enough to take much more than the chill out of the air, let alone actually heat the house. This was perfectly normal. Fear of the oil bill was enough to terrify folk into switching off the boiler between May and December. Few families enjoyed "Continental" holidays and those that did returned with glamorous tans, colourful summer clothes and the car boot filled with French wine.

The rest of us came home from three weeks in Kerry with windburn, bee stings, hives and a boot load of soggy rain gear. We were constantly reminded to turn off the lights or shut the doors in an effort to save energy. We ate apples and pears from our gardens and indeed stole them from everyone else's.

Period houses were "modernised" which included vast numbers of huge radiators, false lowered ceilings covered in aeroboard insulation tiles, blocked up fireplaces and useless coal effect electric fires.

It wasn't always a case of lack of taste and total disregard for architecture but a simple need for comfort and warmth. We added crude extensions to our homes, which were either too small to be of any use, or so large that their proportions didn't bear any resemblance to other rooms in the house.

They never really fitted in and were forever more referred to as the "new room", the "good room" or simply as  "the extension".

In the 1980s we had mass emigration and the property market, which had never been up to much anyway, ground to an absolute halt. Interest rates were sky high and if you had a permanent and pensionable job, you stuck with it, irrespective of how much you hated it. The idea that you might skip from one job to the next, let alone one country to the next, was unthinkable.

There was a smell of hope in the air by the late 1980s and early 1990s but few of us guessed what was yet to come. Suddenly we were all talking in millions. There were the surprised Lotto millionaires, the surprising dotcom millionaires (no one quite understood the concept) and the astonished new breed of property millionaires.

Our bedrooms became boudoirs and our bathrooms became private sanctuaries and our gardens became outdoor rooms. Kitchens took on ballroom-style proportions via architect-designed glass box extensions attached to much coveted and well-located period homes. And just as we were getting the hang of living the good life, the bubble burst. Well it was more like a slow puncture really. It took us a while to believe it was actually happening.

So now we must go back to scraping the ice off the inside of our windows, turning off a few radiators and lights, lowering our ceilings, sticking aeroboard tiles back up, cutting down trees in our landscaped gardens and burning logs in our newly restored fireplaces, reducing the gargantuan kitchen to the cosy pantry it used to be and using the last of the cheap Ryanair flights to leave home and look for work in Russia and Poland.

Sure, it could be worse. And with a bit of luck, we'll probably all survive to tell the tale.