I recommended something a few weeks ago and I must apologise, profusely, and also admit that I was wrong. Because this thing I recommended, it has both completely changed my life for the better but also completely ruined it. This thing, this evil thing, has seduced me and folded me into its warm, possessive embrace and then it has made me believe that nothing worthwhile exists outside of our hot little love bubble.
Now I’m not one for drama but really. It can’t go on. I’m at the point where I just don’t want to get out of bed in the morning, or even in the afternoon. I have started calling my bed the “horizontal office”, in jest, at first, but the problem is becoming serious. I can tell you that productivity levels in a horizontal office, that has its foundations built on a Caspar memory foam mattress and three layers of brushed cotton bed linen, are not the same as productivity levels in an actual office. One with a solid floor, a proper chair and nowhere to “quickly have an eyes-closed thinking session”.
You will have guessed, perhaps, that all of this is in reference to my new electric mattress warmer, the brilliantly-named Snowed In. It’s widely-available, this thing, hugely effective and – unbelievably – doesn’t come with any sort of public health warning about the fact that it might begin to slowly ruin your life. That it might do its job so well, so unbelievably well, turning your mattress into – essentially – a giant hot water bottle, that all things outside of the bedroom cease to matter.
I jokingly mentioned in my recommendation that I could see myself becoming like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, never leaving the bed for meals or for any sort of activity at all, making the rest of the family come in to see me and report on their daily news, play Cluedo, do their times tables practise, perform (low-energy) dance routines/gymnastics, etc.
But we should never joke about these things! Because I’m almost at that point! Last week I worked for three whole days from the bed, periodically hitting the timer button on the electric mattress protector to provide me with another hour of snuggly bliss. One more hour, I kept thinking, and I’ll get out of bed, get dressed and go and sit at my desk. But why leave an “office” that feels like sitting on the beach in the Bahamas (I imagine) to go to one that would feel, comparatively, like sitting on the deck of an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea?
Who would self-sabotage in this way? Not I.
So in the horizontal office I remain, my productivity dwindling to a pathetic dribble, no videos recorded, no makeup selfies because why would I wear makeup in bed, and you have to wonder: how low will I have to go before I pick myself back up again? Will I only emerge from my luxury-linen-lined chrysalis when the blossom begins to appear on the trees? What will draw me from my den of heated iniquity? The sound of newborn lambs, piped in stealthily so that they gradually infiltrate my subconscious? (“Alexa! Play the sound of newborn lambs.”)
I think that it will probably require some sort of crisis intervention, perhaps jointly from my management team and accountant. A two-pronged approach. Reminding me that actually I really do need to get some actual work done, actually. If that’s OK.
And so I apologise if you followed up on my heated mattress protector recommendation and are also finding it life-ruinous. Ditto if you keep having mad, mad dreams because your overnight body temperature is approximately forty-eight degrees centigrade, or if you’re having to go for extra health checks because you’ve managed to slow-cook your liver into a blob of fois gras and dehydrate your kidneys into little sun-dried tomatoes.
You can find the electric blanket here online (affiliate link) if all of this sounds marvellous. Just don’t say I didn’t warm you…
Here’s a curious thing that is very loosely related: last week I was in a central London hotel room that had a heating/air conditioning controller that would only let you adjust the hotel-set temperature by three degrees either way. What in the name of control freakery was this? Why would you not just let your guests decide whether they would like to be as cool as a cucumber or hot as a toastie?
But the sadistic control panel wasn’t the best part. Guess what temperature the panel was set to? Guess what temperature the hotel, in all of its wisdom, had decided was smack bang in the middle of the six-degree temperature range that the majority of normal, sane people would select for their away-from-home comfort?
You will never guess.
It’s absolute insanity.
Guesses ready? Well get this:
