Peter Rhodes on hot beds, cold rooms and the promise of firmer false teeth

My recent item on the noise generated by heat pumps raises an obvious question: what happens to your heat pump in a power cut? After some research on the internet, I have the answer: it goes off.

One heat-pump installer points out online that, in a power cut, a gas or oil-fired central heating system would also go off, so with a heat pump “you're no worse off.” What a great advertising slogan.

Mind you, at least modern technology will spare us from all those phone calls you get during a power cut from friends and neighbours all asking: “Are you off, too?” Thanks to the demise of old-fashioned landlines and the arrival of digital internet-only phones, during power cuts you won't get any phone calls at all.

Meanwhile, Octopus Energy is providing 20,000 free electric blankets to vulnerable customers (in this case I suspect “free” means all the other customers are paying). I hope the recipients make the most of it. 

As the temperature falls, there is no greater luxury in life than to skip out of a freezing bathroom, hop across a perishing landing, plunge into your arctic bedroom and dive into a pre-heated bed as hot as hades, to become the meat in a toasted sandwich, gently cooking 'twixt duvet and electric blanket. Bliss.

I don't know much about Kim Leadbeater MP and I'm not a great fan of her assisted-dying bill. But, goodness, what a fine speaker she us. 

She talks quickly yet concisely in proper sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end. 

She follows the thread of an argument without drifting off into blind alleys or blather. Hearing Leadbeater promoting and defending her bill was to see plain English being used at its best, in sharp contrast to some of the mumbling, fumbling, illogical nonsense spouted by some honourable members.

Boffins at King's College London have produced dentures with incredible sticking power, modelled on the tentacle suckers found on the octopus. 

How inspired, how imaginative. Mind you, they might have equally inspired by studying the suckers on a less exotic creation, the common or garden rubber bath mat. Tenacious little things, aren't they?