Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

If you value your life, move away from that thermostat

How to keep warm this winter.

Deborah Ross
Monday 03 December 2012 19:55 GMT
Comments

If you ask me, I would like to offer a guide to that annual, winter-long event, The Central Heating Fight; a fight which, I believe, is already being enacted in all those homes across the country where one half of a couple feels the cold and the other one does not.

This guide, which I devised in conjunction with a sensible person who does not associate the use of central heating with any kind of moral or physical defectiveness, offers this advice:

* If your partner recommends you “do some star jumps” and then “put on another jumper to keep warm”, you can: 1) punch him to the back of the head; 2) punch him to the front of the head; 3) punch him to the side of the head. All three are perfectly permissible, as well as understandable, and to summarise: if you see a bit of head, punch him in it.

* Should your partner, in the first instance, look at you disbelievingly when you say you are cold, you may come back with: “Yes, I’m making it up because I have nothing else to do today. Later, I’m even planning on saying I’m tired when I’m not at all, and will be putting on washing that doesn’t need washing. Heck, it all passes the time.” Should such sarcasm go over his head, punch him in it a bit more.

* Inevitably, whenever you turn the heating on or up, he will, the moment your back is turned, turn it off or down, so there may be no alternative but to camp out next to the thermostat while armed with an axe and a fighting dog of your choice. (Generally, I find Rottweilers very good, but ultimately this comes down to personal choice.) Arming yourself with a Kalashnikov may be going a bit far, but if you have one handy, why not?

* If he returns after being out all day and you’ve had the heating on full blast and he starts opening doors and windows while doing a lot of exaggerated fanning and saying things like “it’s tropical in here” and “what are we living in? A sauna?” and you’ve run out of bits of his head to punch, you can now start working down the body.

* Should he “cheat” by leaving the heating on and up, but then goes about slyly turning off individual radiators – you will know this has happened when you keep asking yourself “why am I still cold, when the heating is on and up?” – this is when the punching has to stop and tampering with car brakes and the employment of undetectable poisons come into their own. Or even detectable poisons on the grounds that prison has to be warmer.

I’m sorry, but this is what happens to people when they are denied heat. It can just so easily turn them murderous.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in