My Happy Place

I've finished the Bill Bryson book "The Thunderbolt Kid" which is almost cause for a celebration in itself. The book itself is really good don't get me wrong. I like Bill Bryson and he's also the author of one of my favourite books of all time "A Short History of Nearly Everything" which if you didn't read it in 2006 when it was chic you should still read it anyways because it still has the ability to make you a little bit cooler than you are right now. No, I need to celebrate because I finished a book at all and it been a long time coming. I feel literaturely relevant again. I know I'm getting ahead of myself but it's a big deal to me. Bryson can be laugh out loud funny which is pretty hard to do. A mental snigger,ok, or a little audible giggle, maybe, but he really cracks me up which is really hard. "The Thunderbolt Kid" is about him growing up in the 50's and 60's in Des Moines, Iowa and he relates all these different stories to how it was and how idyllic it actually was. There is a part of the story where he talks about staying over at his grandparents tiny house and having to sleep on the "sleeping porch" which was freezing in the winter. I've picked out a bit that I really liked:
"The only heat that the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It couldn't have been more than one or two degrees warmer than the world outside - and outside it was perishing. So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear,pyjamas,jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfathers old cardigan and bathrobe,two pairs of woollen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with ear flaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets,three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold,shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss".
I loved that little section because, I'm going to let you in on a little secret of mine because we're friends here, I love sleeping in the cold. Like freezing cold, albeit all wrapped up and snuggly. My mother says that when I was a baby I had colic and she used to lay me to bed next to an open window even during the winter to help my coughing. That may have had something to do with how it started. I can remember being about 10 or 12 in Worcester and having the bedroom window wide open ,which was just above my bed, and it started snowing during the night. The window had a screen on it, so the snow didn't get in but I can still remember being gloriously warm/cold under my blankets. My grandmother had a sleeping porch off the lounge of her house and when I stayed with her for a while I got to sleep in there where it was absolutely freezing. I loved it. I would love for it to be freezing cold and just have ten blankets on top of me. The only downside was, your body only warms the area where it has direct contact with. Once you've warmed a particular area, that's it. You can't move for the rest of the night without getting shocked by the cold that lies only inches from your body. Don't get me wrong here, I don't like the cold per se, I like being warm in the cold, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, I don't get to feed that beast much anymore. Mrs Finndego is decidedly the opposite. I'm typing this post from my bed and I can see the heat waves rising from her side of the bed where she has her electric blanket on the "Chernobyl" setting. She's not even in bed yet and the heater is on and the house is a comfortable 18C. So, you know what I do now? When I go to bed and I start to nod off and I enter that half awake/half asleep subconsciousness I go to my happy place. Do you know where my happy place is? A snow cave. A fucking snow cave. Sometimes, I imagine that I'm on a sailboat in the middle of the Southern Ocean with 30ft waves and howling winds. A while back I saw this doco where a guy slept out in the middle of the Gobi desert in the middle of winter by burning wood to heat some stones and then covered the hot stones with dirt that was heated by the stones. That would be friggin cool. A human Hangi.