Hottle wottle bottle...

Hot water bottle time is on the way. There’s nothing quite like a hottle-wottle-bottle to keep your chilly toes warm at night. It sits there snug at the bottom of your bed, too hot to touch, and then later a cold rubber lump that you kick to the bottom of the bed because it feels like a slug.

In the days before rubber hot water bottles it was all warming pans and hot stones wrapped in linen. Then along came earthenware bottles with screw lids, I have a couple of these and I’ve even used them. I have a childhood memory of Corona lemonade bottles wrapped in towels being used to warm the bed on exceptionally cold nights.

Once my bottle burst, the rubber all flaky and perished; water soaked my bed and I had to sleep on the floor. Luckily it wasn’t too hot and I wasn’t scalded, although even now I always overfill and use boiling water despite what the instructions say. A leaking bottle is a dispiriting thing, you always find out too late and no matter how hard you try you can never get a replacement stopper.

Hot water bottle covers, a relatively recent development. I’ve had some great covers over the years – cats, elephants, even Betty Boop, but they all serve the same purpose as the old terry nappies my mum used to wrap our bottles in.

For a while, in my pre-teens, I had a Walter Hottle Bottle. I bought it from the local chemist, probably a copyright breach, but who cared. Walter was in a comic. He was a special, magic, hot water bottle that belonged to a boy called Charles. When Charles dreamt, Walter would come to life and take him on every sort of adventure imaginable. In his dreams, Charles met living snowmen, collected missing cuckoos for his clock, built sandcastles in the Arabian desert, met dwarves, even took a trip to the moon. There were no limits to Charles’ adventures because, like most young boys, his imagination was boundless. How I envied Charles.

Walter appeared in my sister’s kid’s comic; Jack and Jill. Of course I pretended not to read it, but when my sister went to bed I’d sneak it to my room and read Charles and Walter’s latest adventure. For some reason Walter always reminded me of a Dutch miller, maybe it was the blue hat and coat and the white trousers. To be honest he was a scary little bugger and if he'd have woken me from my dreamy sleep one evening I'd probably have screamed and jumped out of bed - or shit it.

Anyway, it’s that time of year again. I think I’ll boil the kettle.