Patio heaters drive me FLAMING MAD!

They’re naff, dangerous and are destroying the planet. That’s why QUENTIN LETTS fumes . . .

A NYONE who has flown over the Middle East at night will have seen, on the ground below, those flickering flames from oil-fields.

Excess gas is allowed to burn from tall pipes, creating thousands of little balls of orange light on the darkened landscape.

They could be amber gems glistening in Ali Baba’s cave. But what a waste it seems — glaring testimony to mankind’s arrogance as the rich squander precious energy into the night sky.

An Arabian extravagance? Well, here in Britain we do much the same thing.

In recent years, there has been a craze for devices that are little more than gigantic, pointless Bunsen burners. I am referring to patio heaters. They are supposedly the answer to all our outdoor entertaining problems, bringing that glow of fleeting warmth to the alfresco experience. Yet what an environmental monstrosity, what an aesthetic horror, what testaments to self-indulgence they are.

And, as we learned last week, they can be very dangerous.

Shirley Evans, a mother of three from Basildon, Essex, was burned horribly by a patio heater. The 34-year-old was chatting with neighbours outside her home on a chilly evening. As dusk fell and the temperature dropped, A friend fetched a patio heater to prolong their outdoor conversazione.

With the heater’s fuel level running low, someone decided to top it up — but did so without switching off the thing.

That mistake caused a container of bioethanol to catch light. There was an explosion, a sheet of flame, screams. Shirley suffered such appalling burns, doctors feared she would not survive.

That she did so is probably only thanks to the quick-wittedness of her 13-year-old son Vinnie, the expertise of doctors at Chelmsford’s Broomfield Hospital and Shirley’s resilience as she has fought back from the burns that covered 67 per cent of her body.

It would obviously be unfair to suggest that what happened to Shirley Evans was anything but a freak accident. But it would never have happened had we resisted the societal selfdelusion that lies behind patio heaters.

Sadly, they have become widespread. One lobby group has spoken of a ‘patio pandemic’, with more than a million such devices now being used across the country.

The theory behind them runs thus: never again need we humans shiver outdoors, for we are the boss- cats, bigger than the elements, masters and mistresses of all we survey.

It is the same thinking that led King Canute’s advisers to insist that their monarch could command the tides. The globe is our dominion.

Who cares what damage we do to the environment? Who cares what finite resources we may be splurging, and denying to future generations?

We want to be outside, whatever the climate, and we wanna be Hwarm! Such is the attitude of the patio heatists. OWEVEr grotty the weather, the 21stcentury West believes itself insuperable. One turn of a knob, one press on an ignition button and, whoompf, the good Lord’s bounty burns over our heads like one of those red glow-lamps with which they warm all-day sausages at a Little Chef cafe.

With a patio heater, say the salesmen, we need never again be cold in the great outdoors.

More often than not, these roaring braziers are found on draughty streets outside urban pubs and restaurants. Yet the word ‘patio’ invokes gracious evenings under the stellar Spanish sky.

OK, the streetscape before us may be Walsall or Wallsend on a wet weekday evening, but can we not imagine it somewhere more exotic?

Under a patio heater, with one or two Bacardi Breezers down our gullets and a smear of fake tan on our thighs, our horizons stretch.

We can almost convince ourselves that the night air is throbbing to a chorus of crickets.

Hark, is that not the clackclack of distant flamenco music ( answer: no, it’s Tracey’s high heels as she teeters back from the lavs.) We may suppose we are sophisticates, soaking up cafe culture. In fact, we remain goose- pimpled Brits pushing back pints of Carling while this manic heater roars like a Harrier jump-jet and some jaded Slade song thumps out on the Pig & Whistle’s publicbar jukebox.

The marketing men conjure up images of a pine-scented pueblo but, in reality, heater-owners are merely being broiled by a £339.99 Tahiti Flame Heater from the local DIY superstore. What ridiculous names they have — the Santorini or La Hacienda or the Palm Springs or the Sahara.

Some of them — if severelyburnt Shirley Evans will excuse this expression — cost an arm and a leg. The stainless steel Dolce Vita retails at a cool £1,278. Huddled around these decadent fires are forlorn, shivering souls who have been driven out of pubs by New Labour’s 2007 antismok ing laws.

How ironic that the same New Labour was devoted to the theology of man-made climate-change but could not see that, if the experts are to be believed, patio heaters do more to worsen global warming than a revved-up Humvee army truck. Pressure group Friends Of The Earth says the energy used by a heater in one hour is the equivalent of boiling a single kettle enough times to make 400 cups of tea.

With so much of the warmth from a patio heater being lost into the night sky, you do not have to be a signed-up member of the Green party to question the morality of patio heaters.

With energy so sparse and our country being perilously reliant on foreign sources, including Vladimir Putin’s russia — how can it be wise or even Christian to throw away so much gas and electricity on these ridiculous machines?

British weather being what it is, the heaters never quite do their job. They may succeed in warming one side of a bystander’s body — which may soon start to resemble a toasted marshmallow — but the other side remains chilly.

Most of the heat from the gas just shoots up towards what is left of the ozone layer.

Unlike car engines, patio heaters are not fitted with fuel-efficiency devices which reduce the gases that they produce. The warming value of a patio heater is effectively ten times less than that of an indoors heater. Britain is a North European country. Designers and politicians sometimes forget this.

They want to flog us a dream of cosmopolitanism. But our damp, fog-framed islands crouch below the Arctic Circle and for roughly ten months a year they are too cold for us to sit outside after dark in comfort without a layer or two of extra clothing.

Until a few years ago, this was understood. The British were a nation of cardigan-wearers and coat- owners. Our chests of drawers contained various gradations of ‘ woolly’, from summer evening tank-top to Vneck to full-weight Guernsey.

But now, knitwear is out and skimpy T- shirts and allyear shorts are in. Did former Lib Dem MP Norman Baker not have a point when he criticised patio heaters, saying ‘instead of reaching for the gas canister, people should reach for another jumper’.

These monstrosities are a gas-guzzling abomination, a denial of reality, a dreadful illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

They are an absurd response to the bossy eviction of all those smokers who huddle under awnings after being expelled from their public house snugs by an over-zealous officialdom. Central heating in the open air? Is there a greater example of madness?