One of my earliest memories as a child is my little hands plugging in the old electric blanket for my visiting grandmother and then being violently thrown across the room after it short-circuited.
Being electrocuted was a strange and horrible sensation. I don’t even remember crying out as a nasty current ran through my body like I was a human extension cord. I was literally shocked (just as the name of the affliction promised), bewildered that such a thing could happen, staring at the soot on my hands, then up at my ashen grandmother.
It strikes me as strange that decades later, in this time of such enormous technological breakthroughs, Australians in their cold, poorly designed houses still rely on a rubber bag filled with boiling water pressed against their chests, and/or a mesh undersheet with an electric current running through it as their main source of night-time heating.
That some people combine the boiling water rubber bag and the electric current blanket and blissfully surrender their consciousness for eight hours is wild to me.
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Think of all the ways it could go wrong: the bag bursting on to your bare skin, scalding it, being electrocuted when the water hits the electric grid that you’re lying on top of and then the bed catching fire after the grid short-circuits.
I’d rather be cold.
When I first started working at Parliament House in 2022, a veteran journalist with a terrifying reputation pulled me to one side to give me some advice about Canberra.
I braced myself, expecting something along the lines of “stay away from the meditation room after dusk” or “avoid [name redacted] at the Kingo”. But instead she said, “Flannel.”
“What?”
“Flannel. You need flannel.”
In order to survive a brutal Canberra winter I needed to buy good flannel sheets and flannel pyjamas, she said.
The cold in Canberra, everybody told me, was not like other cities. It was not like the wet cold of Melbourne or the mild cold of Sydney.
This was a cold that had teeth, that made you feel alive. Cold so brittle and sharp it was not unforeseeable that your toes, fingers and ears may fall off if exposed.
Everyone I met in Canberra had developed elaborate winter rituals that didn’t just involve flannel but layering, thermal underwear, gloves, possum-fur socks and hats, specialty curtains that absorbed the cold and ducted heating.
In my two-star energy-rated apartment, waking up to condensation on the inside of the windows and feeling as though I had frozen in the night to a solid block of ice, flannel did not cut it. I relented and bought an electric blanket. I made someone else plug it in – just in case it was faulty – and when they weren’t flung across the room, I quickly became a convert.
The start of the nights with the electric blanket were heaven, so good in fact that my bedtimes kept getting earlier and earlier. To emerge from the cold night into an even colder house, then slide into the level-three heat lodge of my bed, felt like being placed in a searing hot sandwich press.
It was bliss. The best part of my day was sliding into that boiling bed!
But then the inevitable would happen. Having turned the blanket on at level three then fallen asleep without having turned it down, I would partially wake at 1am like a piece of lasagne that is burnt on one side and frozen on the other. I would be still, somehow, in a deep sleep, horrifically hot, partially frozen, yet unable to turn the blanket off because the cord was too far away – so just lying there, having an electric sleep that buzzed with malevolent, dangerous energy.
I would wake up groggy and unrefreshed.
Now it’s winter again, and the electric blanket is remaining in its box. I have discovered that the journalist’s advice is correct. You can’t go wrong with flannel.
