THERE ARE BASICALLY TWO WAYS of keeping warm in bed. The first is to generate heat through volcanic passion. This is great for two minutes, but then you’ve still got the rest of the night to shiver through. Far better to wear brushed-cotton pyjamas thick enough to stop armour-piercing shells …
Women love men’s traditional snuggly pyjamas, so much so that you generally find women inside men’s traditional snuggly pyjamas. Women’s full-length woolly nighties are absolutely no good for keeping warm as, basically, they’re a tent with no ground sheet.
The reason why beds get cold in the first place is that women put their feet in them. Women’s feet work on the reverse principle to hot-water bottles; they are as warm as toast all day but cold, rubbery and totally unappealing during the night.
To combat this, women have evolved heat-seeking feet that migrate towards the nearest source of heat, often a man on the other side of the bed. A standard woman’s foot can drain the entire body-heat from an adult male in half the time it takes to fill up with a tank of unleaded.
The second technique women use is duvet-winching, by which the woman turns over and pulls the duvet with her, and then keeps turning until she’s rolled up in five layers of duvet.
To avoid dying of hypothermia, men in turn have developed a range of bedroom calisthenics: flapping the duvet, tugging the duvet, pulling the duvet down to cover feet, pulling duvet up to cover shoulders, and, finally, going to sleep in the spare room.
Beware of a woman who asks to ‘spoon’. This deadly combination of foot-sapping and duvet-winching can leave a man exposed to the elements.
For men, that’s when you need your thick pyjamas, which, of course, the woman is wearing. The only way to get them back is to revert to strategy one: the two minutes of volcanic passion.
© GUY BROWNING IS AUTHOR OF ‘NEVER PUSH WHEN IT SAYS PULL’ AND CREATOR OF ‘TORTOISE IN LOVE’ (DVD) – USED BY PERMISSION.
