Of duvet days and velvety nights

Who cares if we look like Michelin Men, waddling about in pumped-up coats?

THIS time last year, I was extolling the joys of the furry hot-water bottle. Lots of readers agreed about the utter bliss of them and, here we are again, warming our extremities on these items in the deliciously non-busy days between Christmas and New Year.

Now, I’m going to praise another warmth-inducing, life-changing comfort: the ‘duvet coat’. I think its official name is the ‘quilted coat’, but I call mine my duvet coat because the warmth it gives is absolutely akin to duvet warmth. Who cares if we look like fat Michelin Men, waddling about in coats that look as if someone has pumped up each section with a tyre pump?

The thing is, these coats are so magically light and warm that going out for a walk, even, say, in Berlin in midwinter—not that I am in such a place—no longer holds the terrors it used to.

Wandering the rainy streets of Paris in December, walking my dog slowly around the park, going for the Boxing Day walk: all of these are pleasures rather than ordeals, as the duvet coat makes me as warm and insulated as the Ready Brek child.

However expensive they are, however, duvet coats can’t completely shed their slightly anoraky look, which means that you need another coat for funerals: heavy, black, woollen, moth-attracting —and not nearly as warm.

Are steak knives acceptable? I’ve always been rather against them, classing them, with fish knives and three-pronged cake forks, as ‘specialised cutlery’ no household should contain.

However, sawing his way thanklessly through a toughish piece of rump steak with one of our blunt, old round-ended knives recently, my eldest son said: ‘We need steak knives.’

I did see his point and asked a few friends whether steak knives were permissable at home. One or two admitted that they did own a set of six, just for steak days, so I put a set in son’s stocking (with a price tag of 1p, because isn’t it supposed to be bad luck to give a knife as a present?).

I don’t really approve, but, my goodness, those steak knives cut through meat as keenly as Cutty Sark sliced through the Indian Ocean.

Do any theatres still have curtains in front of the stage? Perhaps some pantomime theatres still do. I hope so. It’s ages since I went to a play where you couldn’t see the scenery as you sat down. Pitch-darkness is the new curtain, as stage hands silently rearrange props.

The lack of curtains might enhance the ‘immersive experience’, but it robs you of the moment of surprise I remember from the 1970s, when the curtain rose to unveil ‘a drawing room, mid-afternoon’, with a Bakelite telephone, a woman on sofa and a butler entering stage right, carrying a salver.

Now, you need to go to the Royal Opera House or Coliseum if you crave the velvety moment of curtain up and curtain down. Even as you read this, the dancers in the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker will be emerging through the narrow gap between the luscious curtains to take their elegant balletic bows against the backdrop of the scarlet pleats. It’s worth going to the opera or ballet just for that—apart from the anticlimax of the safety curtain.

Ican’t get my head around the brandnew ‘life-fitness crosstrainers’ (otherwise known as treadmills) in my local gym, which I sometimes force myself to go to after a particularly sedentary day.

The gym has just been refurbished and each machine has its own mini-television. The thing I can’t get my head around is that you now burn more calories doing 20 minutes of exercise than you did on the old machines. That’s good news, of course—you want to burn off the pain au chocolat you’ll soon be enjoying—but does this mean that these new machines are, in fact, less efficient than the old ones?

It surely does. Is this the only example of a machine having to get ‘worse’ and less efficient in order to work better?

Afriend mentioned to me the other day that her least favourite ‘autocorrect’ is when her phone changes ‘reading’ to ‘Reading’. That is horrible. What would Jane Austen say, if she tried to write that Mr Darcy was ‘a reading man’ and her phone corrected it to ‘a Reading man’?

I can add my phone changing ‘carol’ to ‘Carol’—especially infuriating in the Christmas season. Also if you text ‘so sorry to hear you’re ill. Get well soon’, the words will be changed to ‘I’ll’ and ‘we’ll’.

As someone once texted to me, after a bad morning of autocorrections: ‘There’s a special place in Hull reserved for the inventors of autocorrect.’

Ysenda Maxtone Graham is the author of Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939–1979. She lives in London Next week Kit Heskethharvey