Brits on heat

When in America, many Brits show sudden concern for the environment, and accuse Yanks of squandering energy resources. This is because they are very uncomfortable inside buildings, felled by the white-hot blast of serious central heating. They complain that it makes them dopey.

In America, Brits first experience uniform heating, having typically spent formative years searching for the warm spots in cold rooms. Suddenly, they areparched. They throw open hotel windows in a desperate bid to re-create draughts. Bowls of water placed by the bed simulate the general air of dampness they associate with home. Brits can’t sleep in a room where there’s no condensation on the mattress.

In fact, they are not only grumpy in wrap-around central heating ... they are psychologicallydistressed by it. Heat, to be acceptable, must have a source – must be directional. For preference, it should come from the front (coal fires, gas or electric heaters) leaving your face flushed, your back and shoulders stiff and frozen. ‘Proper’ heat is something around which a normal family can group the three statutory pieces furniture. Try that around a warm-air duct.

Ordeal by water

AMERI-THINK: It is a question of what turns you on, and what you turn on. Yanks believe that British bathrooms exist to mortify the flesh ... (some peoplelike it). Icy bowl seats, abrasive toilet-tissue, showers that don’t work (inadequate water-pressure) or spray everywhere (hard water sediment’s bunged up the holes). If you’re lucky, you get a thin trickle – useless for washing shampoo out of hair, but perfect for flooding the floor. This is even easier when the shower curtain is missing. Brit bathrooms are not for sybarites. They are frosty places where one learns the true meaning of endurance. When the British Army wants to go on survival training exercises, it spends two or three nights in a British bathroom.

Then there are Great British Bath Taps. Brits practise a kind of lavatorial Apartheid; hot-and-cold taps are separated as far as porcelain will allow, with nary a warm-water mixer in sight. One tap is scalding, the other is ice-cold. It tests initiative to regulate the flow to produce a mix of the required degree of warmness. By the time you discover your bath’s too cold, you’ll have exhausted the supply of hot water.

Some help is at hand in the form of the new, hi-tech British mixer. This produces not warm water, but parallel streams of hot and cold running from the same tap. There are myriad possibilities for serious injury; and since spouts are placed as close to the sides of the basin as possible, it is virtually impossible to wet a toothbrush or fill a glass without risking collision.

Beddy-bye

Hardy Yanks who survive the rigours of a British bathroom and make it into bed are not home and dry. At least not dry. Apart from the dampness factor, there is the question of flatness. British beds aren’t. The tops are stitched and tufted to make sure that:

1. you never enjoy a smooth night’s sleep, and

2. lint of scientific interest gathers in the holes.

Traditional Brit-bedding is lumpy bedding. Furthermore, all-wool blankets of enormous hairiness are still preferred. They immobilize your legs under a great weight, and keep you in place – which is just as well, since Brit beds are very high, and if you roll out the fall can kill you.