Sophia Money-Coutts: I was cancelled for telling cold students to put on a jumper

Have you put the heating on yet?
Have you put the heating on yet? - Getty

Have you put the heating on yet? I’m impressed if you haven’t, but these days there are plenty of toughies who hold out. My friend Clare, for instance. She’s barely turned her heating on since 2022 when energy prices shot up, although admittedly she lives in a top-floor flat so that makes it a bit easier. Clare has an electric blanket on her sofa to keep warm while watching TV in the evening, “and I have a hot water bottle basically down my trousers all day”.

Sometimes, she gives her towels a quick blast on the towel rail. Otherwise, no heating. Ever. Not even during those beastly cold snaps that we always get in March when we mistakenly believe we’re through the drudgery of winter. Clare is the stuff on which empires were built.

The rest of us have probably already engaged in thermostat skirmishes. According to a poll, a quarter of us squabble with our other halves over its settings, while two thirds of us say we regularly change the thermostat – 10 times a week, on average – because another pesky member of the family has fiddled with it.

I have a particular interest in thermostat wars, not just because I like being warm, but because it’s landed me in hot (ha ha) water before. In 2019, I wrote a piece defending a landlord who’d put the Nest thermostat in his London flat in a locked plastic box on the wall, so no tenants could change the settings. He’d duly rented his flat to a gaggle of students, and one of these students took a photo of said thermostat and stuck it on social media with the caption “Welcome to renting in London, our landlord’s put our thermostat in a cage!”. Naturally, because all landlords are deemed evil, this picture went viral.

At the time, a jobless friend was living with me. I am extremely fond of him, but he took to coming home at around 3 or 4 every morning and drunkenly whacking my Nest thermostat up to 26 or 27 degrees. I would consequently wake and panic that my flat was on fire. He and I discussed it but the habit continued, so I started draping several towels over the radiator in my room before going to bed to mitigate the intense heat that would inevitably be generated later. As a result, I wrote in defence of the landlord who’d put his thermostat in a cage, saying I wished I had a cage, quite frankly, and if the students were cold they should simply put on a jumper.

Dear me, the resulting fuss. It was the first time I was cancelled. “This is the problem with the rich,” screamed one of Jeremy Corbyn’s lieutenants, pasting my photo and the article on Twitter. For saying put on a jumper? Is that a particularly offensive and vulgar thing to say? It was lunacy. I wasn’t arguing that the young and elderly should shiver to death. Merely suggesting that, if you’re a mite chilly at home, you could always, you know, pop on another layer.

Five years on, I feel vindicated, because now we’re all supposed to put on jumpers instead of dialling the thermostat up. Although because the matter of heating has become such a hot (sorry) topic in the meantime, thermostat wars have also become more fraught.

Part of the problem is that smart thermostats, the likes of a Nest or a Hive, make it very easy to see what the temperature is and nudge it up or down a bit (unless you’ve got one of those handy cages). Feeling chilly? A teenager who might once have been as baffled by an analogue thermostat as an elephant with an iPad can change a digital one in seconds. Ooh, toasty.

The other issue is nobody seems able to decide what the temperature inside should be. As someone who lives in a draughty Victorian conversion, I am so fascinated by this that I sometimes scroll through online threads by other people discussing how warm, or not, their homes are. Others get their kicks from abseiling or leaping from airplanes; each to their own. Some say 18 degrees; some wail that this is too cold and they set theirs at around 21 degrees, which sounds pretty tropical to me. Do you own a rare and exotic parrot or snake which requires that sort of heat?

Mine is generally set to 18.5 degrees, and between now and March I will, tragically, monitor it via my Hive app almost as often as I look at Instagram. Last January, while I was in Kenya, I had a little look, spied that the heating had been on all night and sent a terse message to my flatmate saying could she turn it down again. Extremely Marie Antoinettish behaviour given that I was watching lions and gallivanting about in shorts at the time.

Since more of us work from home now, can one justifiably run the heating all day? Last month, it was reported that two thirds of all workers are tempted back into the office during the cold months for the “free” heating. I don’t blame them; running the boiler all day feels wildly extravagant, and I don’t really fancy the hot-water-bottle-down-the-trousers trick, so I usually light the stove in my sitting room, which doubles as my office, and tap away in there all day as my (sustainably sourced) logs burn behind me.

If Orwell managed in the Hebrides, surely I can manage in southeast London? I wouldn’t be without my recycled fingerless cashmere gloves from a company called Turtle Doves, though, which is a top tip if you’re on the hunt for Christmas presents. They’re fabulous.

My only dilemma is Dennis, the puppy. He still sleeps in his crate, but in the spare room where the radiators are permanently off, unless someone human is staying with me and sleeping in there. It’s therefore rarely a warm room, but Dennis does have two sheepskins, a fleecy mattress and several stuffed toys with him. Even so, should I turn on the radiator?

‘Some dogs sleep outside!’ cried a friend when I discussed this important topic with her this week. True. But given that Dennis enjoys fairly expensive dog food and his favourite snack is a venison biscuit, I’m not sure he was ever going to be an outside dog. I suppose I should be grateful that he hasn’t learned to turn the thermostat up, like the teenagers. Given how recall training is going, I suspect we’re a way off that yet.