Everyone warned me that a stone cottage in the countryside would be freezing, and everyone was right. Now it seems total madness that I came close to buying a farmhouse at Land’s End which had no heating, when even my current cottage feels like an ice-block. At least when my dog Stringerbelle was here I had a mobile hot water bottle, but now she is back with my ex, I am bitterly cold.

My Somerset cottage is too remote for gas. Instead it has two fires and central heating powered by a large green oil tank in the garden.

I call the oil company, hesitantly, when I move in to order an oil top-up. They ask me, quite reasonably, how much oil I want, but I have no idea. I’m not even sure how big my tank is. I only called this oil company because the people who sold me the house told me they had an account with them. But the oil company inform me they cannot share any of that information due to “confidentiality”. How incredibly helpful!

R comes over and together we search in the deep grass by the oil tank for a gauge which will show how much is left. We find it broken. My friend Jules, in rural Oxfordshire, shows me a clever device that works out how much oil is left in your tank using some kind of magnet, then shows you the result on a little monitor in the kitchen. But it turns out the oil company charges £200 to install it.

The woman at the oil company advises me that I can check the level of the oil by lowering a stick into the tank. In the garden I find a long, relatively dry branch, and feed it into the tank with unsure results. In the end I err on the side of caution and order the minimum amount of oil I can get, which still costs me nearly £300.

I constantly worry about running out of oil – and the cost of filling up again. But because the heating system is so ancient I’m also afraid that turning off any radiators may mean I can’t get them back on again. I compromise by putting the heating on a timer, so it only comes on for a few hours a day – though as soon as it goes off any warmth vanishes through the stone walls within minutes.

When friends come over all they can talk about is how cold the house is. F sits shivering under a duvet in the sitting room. Martin walks around with a coat on. Ophelia comes to stay and I find her sitting outside in her car. “I just came out to warm up a bit,” she explains.

“How can you live like this?” they all complain, begging me to put the heating back on, which I do, silently calculating how much it’s going to cost me.

When they’re gone, I put on another jumper, some fingerless gloves, and turn the heating back off.

I decide the best plan is to focus on keeping myself warm with big, romantic countryside fires. I order a cubit of logs, with no idea how much this is. “If you order two I won’t charge you delivery,” the log man says, so I readily agree. He arrives, in pouring rain, with my wood in the back of a pick-up truck, depositing it in a vast heap on my lawn then driving off.

I spend the next hour schlepping back and forth carrying logs from the lawn to the garage, shivering wet. But afterwards, when I’ve built my first log pile, I stand back to proudly enjoy the results. Just as I do so, I spot the hole in the roof pouring water onto the wood. So I have to spend the next hour taking my wood pile apart and reassembling it, while adding “fix the garage roof” to my endless “to do” list.

On romantic weekends away, I’ve always loved snuggling up in front of a fire. Evidentially I’d forgotten that these fires must have been built by whoever I was with. On my own I turn out to be terrible at getting the flames going and never sure what I’m doing wrong – are my logs too wet? Is there not enough kindling?

Making a fire for a novel weekend away is also rather different from when you’re doing it desperately on a shivering morning.

At least the good thing about my guests is that they all seem capable of sparkling a fire up from a newspaper and a couple of logs.

I worry about heating, and I worry about all my other bills as well. Although I’ve braced myself for higher costs in my new house than I had in my very small London flat, it’s still worrying reading headlines about the escalating cost of living.

I’m worrying why I’ve never had an electricity bill when I hear the news that my supplier has gone bust. I guess at least that’s one cost I can put on hold for a bit.

Meanwhile, as everyone worries about costs, I hear an item on the radio about a pensioner so worried about electricity bills that she sits by candle-light at night. “That’ll be me soon,” I worry to Martin’s dairy farmer. “Don’t be crazy – have you seen the cost of candles?” he jokes.

So far, I have also not had to face a water bill because I’ve been waiting for a meter to be installed. When it finally gets put in, I suddenly become conscious of the reckless abandon with which I’ve been consuming it. “I suppose now you’ll be expecting us to go to the loo outside in the garden,” jokes Martin. Which doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

I wonder, not for the first time, if I should get a flatmate to help with the bills. “Don’t be insane,” says Martin. “No one is going to want to live here with you. It’s too f—— freezing.”

This week I’ve been obsessed with…

• Nio home-delivery cocktails, so you can drink whiskey sours in the bath while reading Joan Didion (which, let’s face it, is more fun than most bars)
• The Eyes of Tammy Faye – a biopic about the wild rise and fall of 1970s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and her husband, Jim
• The Sweet Bobby podcast, the story of a successful radio presenter duped into an emotionally manipulative relationship by a handsome cardiologist called Bobby, who she meets on Facebook