Arabic version: طقوس شتاء كانبيرا تعيد كاتبة إلى الفانيلا

According to The Guardian, Brigid Delaney’s experience of winter in Canberra led her from fear of electric blankets to reliance on one, before she ultimately returned to flannel bedding and pyjamas.

Delaney recalls an early childhood incident in which she says she was thrown across a room after an old electric blanket short-circuited while she was plugging it in for her grandmother. Decades later, she writes that Australians in cold, poorly designed homes still use hot-water bottles and electric blankets for night-time warmth.

When Delaney began working at Parliament House in 2022, a veteran journalist advised her to buy flannel sheets and flannel pyjamas to cope with Canberra’s winter. Delaney writes that residents she met had developed extensive routines involving layers, thermal underwear, gloves, possum-fur socks, hats, specialty curtains and ducted heating.

In her two-star energy-rated apartment, however, Delaney found flannel insufficient. She describes waking to condensation inside the windows and eventually buying an electric blanket after having someone else test the plug. The blanket made her bed a warm refuge from the cold house, she writes, and prompted increasingly early bedtimes.

That comfort came with disrupted sleep. Delaney says she sometimes fell asleep with the blanket at its highest setting, then woke around 1am feeling overheated on one side and frozen on the other, unable to reach the cord. She writes that she would wake groggy and unrefreshed. With winter returning, Delaney says the electric blanket will stay in its box and concludes that the earlier advice remains sound: “You can’t go wrong with flannel.”