On Saturday It’s time to yearn for a pair of long-johns

YOU can buy anything nowadays without having to budge from your sofa. A click on a screen will bring you anything from a pizza-cutter to a pizza-oven – a kid’s tricycle to an electric bicycle – all delivered within 24 hours, no matter how remote your Westcountry home. So guess what is top of my wish-list?

A tea-cosy.

In fact, I reckon this most homely of objects will become a best-seller and only wish I knew how to buy shares in a tea-cosy making company. But, of course, I have no idea about commerce or the management of money.

Which is why I love our new smartmeter. It tells even an idiot like me exactly how much electricity we are using at any given moment – which in turn has me running around the house turning things off left, right and centre.

Hence the tea-cosy. Since April 1st our new electricity tariff has sent the numbers on the smart-meter leaping ever-upwards like a mountain bike on steroids. Being miles from the nearest gas mains, we’ve been reluctant to use our oil central heating since the Ukraine war sent the price of that particular fossil fuel rocketing, so we’ve been using an electricpowered radiator to take the chill off parts of the house.

Not any more we’re not – despite the cool mornings we’ve had since April Fool’s Day.

On such mornings, any tea brewing inside a pot grows tepid quickly. As all of us know, you need tea to brew properly. Squeezing a tea-bag to the side of a cup with a teaspoon in a bid to draw out its flavour is an appalling thing to do because it results in the liquid tasting vaguely of cardboard. However, allowing tea to brew for a few minutes in a kitchen which feels like the inside of a fridge will guarantee another bad result. A lukewarm cuppa. An abomination which should, in a righteous world, be against the law.

What a chap needs, I have discovered with hardly any research because it’s so blindingly obvious, is a tea-cosy.

I remember the home-knitted teacosies which would adorn the “front parlours” ruled by my great aunts – who were large women addicted to high tea and cake. They were rightly proud of their tea-cosies which, if I’m honest, didn’t do much for me as a kid. If you’d told the 10-year-old Hesp he’d one day be in need of such a thing, he’d have choked on his Victoria sponge. But then, he’d also have become hysterical had you told him he’d one day be in desperate need of long-johns.

It is dawning on me that items of human underwear such as the humble long-john are about to become very necessary indeed in this new era when most of us will have to take self-help steps to avoid hypothermia. Soon it will be no good thinking we can just push a button and some kind of heating will magically fill the house with warmth. We’ll need a second mortgage to afford that kind of luxury.

And really, when you think about it, thermal underwear is just a form of tea-cosy for humans.

How did it come to this? Until recently I’d lie on our sofa buying things on the internet like foreign holidays and hi-fi earbuds. Now I’m searching for something fluffy in which to bury my teapot, along with the sort of underwear my grandad used to wear!

A friend who lives in a large house in Herefordshire just phoned and I was telling him how our smart-meter was effectively, minute-by-minute, keeping us painfully abreast of the soaring cost-of-living.

“If it goes on like this, we’re all doomed! Doomed I tells ya…” I cried, doing my best Dads Army Private Frazer impersonation. It wasn’t only the energy costs, I wailed, but the price of even the most basic foodstuffs.

“I went around a supermarket the other day and came out feeling faint! I’d just seen my first ten-bob cherry tomato! Half-a-quid! A punnet of eight, each the diminutive size of a fat pea, cost £4! 50 pence each! You could have eaten the lot in a single mouthful!”

Tim listened patiently and agreed that we’re all going to have to tighten our belts once those autumn energy price-hikes kick-in. Both he and I are in our 60s and we talked about how things would return to the world of self-reliance which existed when we were young.

I asked how he and his wife managed to keep warm in their large country pile. “Hotties,” he said. “We each take a hot water bottle to bed.”

Yep. That just about sums it up. The most chilling chat-up line on Earth must be: “Shall we go to bed? Great! Be up in a second, once I’ve made the hot water bottles.”

We are about to enter a new Victorian era like the one our grandads and grannies knew. And now that I am a grandfather it is perhaps fitting that I’m in the market for tea-cosies and long-johns and that the term ‘hottie’ means something very different indeed.

Now I’m a grandfather it is perhaps fitting that I’m in the market for long-johns