There is something deeply primal about hot water bottles. But then I’m of a generation that can remember waking up in bed, blankets tucked under chin, watching as my own breath lingered in the air and faded away. Back then, in a central-heatingless, single-glazed house, my sister and I, who shared a room, would get dressed under the covers and developed strategies to do so while exposing the least amount of skin.
So hot water bottles were a way of getting us into those cold beds in cold rooms in cold weather.
In fact, they were so ubiquitous that later when word hit the street that Bruce Springsteen was playing up the road in Slane, I looked at the cover of Born in the USA, which had attained squatting rights in every cassette player in Navan, and was confused. There was Bruce showing off his tight working-class butt in his tight, working-class jeans but why did he have a hot water bottle poking out of a back pocket? It had to be pointed out to me that this was actually a baseball cap.
No doubt there's an app out there for flicking on an electric blanket while you're still out and about in the world doing important things
Electric blankets came in at some stage and were perfectly fine. A call would go out in our house around 8pm or 8.30pm for someone to turn on the blankets and my siblings and I would disappear or avoid eye contact or dive for cover, hoping that one of the other three would get the job of heading up to the frozen upper level, to do something that in fairness would have taken less than a minute.
I once heard a man on Joe Duffy talk about his pension and reflect at the end of the chat that life wasn't all that bad. After all, he had his own bed and his own electric blanket.
And I applaud the sentiment. But the thing is, while an electric blanket is entirely functional, you can’t actually wrap yourself around one. My mother took to walking around a now fully heated house in her later years, with a hot water bottle clutched to her chest and it sat in her lap as she watched her favourite programmes.
The lure of the hot water bottle may have something to do with the filling ritual.
No doubt there’s an app out there for flicking on an electric blanket while you’re still out and about in the world doing important things but the anticipation involved in watching a kettle boil, hot water bottle in hand, is hard to beat.
Although, of course, the water shouldn’t actually be boiling, as my own brother learned to his cost when it burst in his bed one night with predictably unpleasant results.
Or maybe it's simply to do with feet. I lived in Japan for a while and the Japanese believe in the strongest possible terms that if your feet are cold, you're cold. They've even come up with custom-built tables that can be positioned over heated pits in the floor with space for a quilt to be slipped between the top of the table and the table itself. So you can sit on the floor, a quilt around your legs, your shoeless feet suspended over a gentle heat, while polishing off dinner.
There were times I had to cajoled into extracting myself from those tables. Cajoled or occasionally yanked.
There are now fewer and fewer nights when hot water bottles are actually needed. Climate change has seen to that
Hot water bottles haven’t changed much over the years, the only evolution being the introduction of that fabric cover – a controversial development, which has split opinion in the hot water bottle community. Yes, it’s easier to carry and gentler on sensitive feet but as a colleague pointed out, the feel of that warm rubbery texture at the end of the bed is what hot water bottles are all about.
Warm but, of course, not lukewarm. And inevitably a point will come during the night when sleep sufficiently wanes into consciousness, for a vague recognition to kick in that the hot water bottle has served its function and needs to be despatched from the bed.
There are now fewer and fewer nights when hot water bottles are actually needed. Climate change has seen to that.
But when things get really cold, slipping one between the covers, nestled between pyjama top and bottom is the most logical response, followed a mere five to 10 minutes later by its prompt relocation to the bottom of the bed.
And when cold feet feel for and find that freshly filled bottle, it is an encounter of the most delicious proportions.