Keeping my arms warm in bed

These thoughts were prompted by a friend's email gleefully announcing that she had bought herself a long-sleeved brushed cotton nightgown (half-price in M&S). My first thought was that this was a bit sad. After all, while we are none of us getting any younger, I associate brushed cotton nightgowns of any kind, let alone long-sleeved ones, with my mother and grandmother.

And then I started to think about it.

After all, how many ways are there to keep my arms warm? They always get bitterly cold when I am reading in bed - there's nothing like newsprint to make your hands cold, so why tramps sleep under newspapers to keep warm I can't imagine. I like a cold bedroom - a hot bed but a cold bedroom - because although the rest of me is tucked up snug I do like my nose outside breathing cold fresh air. I can never sleep in hotels and places where the heating is on all night. And this is just as well, as our central heating is always timed to go off a while before our normal bedtime. Polar bears on diminishing ice floes may be glad of this, but I am not. Anyway, by the time I am sitting up in bed with my magazine or review section of Saturday's Guardian (and I have a heap of these going back years as bedtime reading), no matter how warm the rest of me may be, my hands and arms are bitterly cold.

Husband suggested I wear a cardigan, but a cardigan in bed is really only a bed-jacket and if I'm not old enough for nightgowns I am certainly not old enough for bed-jackets. I am not going to go down the road of shampoos and sets, and boudoir caps [go look it up, those readers who don't know what I am talking about] and Teasmades, and those wheeled tables that pull over the bed.

I used to have a shawl, which someone crocheted for me at the time when it was fashionable to have crocheted shawls, and which I used to wear in bed. Goodness knows where it is now - I doubt I ever got rid of it, so it is probably in a suitcase in the loft. But shawls aren't really the thing any more, and now that I am older, I would look like Red Riding Hood's grandma if I sat up in bed wrapped in a shawl, and a wolf in drag isn't a good look.

Perhaps it is time to think about a long-sleeved brushed cotton nightgown.