Are sheets and blankets warmer than a duvet?

This one’s probably going to how my age and my background but what the hell. Does anyone out there remember sleeping in a bed in a cold room with sheets and blankets as a kid instead of a nice fluffy duvet with central heating?

This thought just occurred to me last night as I settled down to go to sleep (actually, it was more like this morning as it was gone 3am!). We have a duvet at the moment and it’s rather a think one so we have a thin sleeping bag and an old purple blanket on the bed as well and for some reason or other this triggered a memory of my childhood.

I grew up in Scotland, not the north of the country where it’s really cold mind, but the part that I came from saw it’s fair share of cold winters and our house was built in a time where a central coal fire was the only form of heating and hot water came from a back boiler and a hot water in the airing cupboard upstairs. Going to bed at night was literally a dash for the covers and getting up in the morning involved sticking a toe out of the bed and trying to gradually acclimatise oneself to the cold gradually. It must all sound pretty harsh to the combi-boiler and radiator generation but it wasn’t all that bad. We did have some roaring coal fires to bask in front of at night and the place did get used to get pretty warm when dad would chuck a raker on the fire or give it a really good draw.

Bed time though was a race to get underneath the covers and warm up. Whilst the downstairs got pretty warm the upstairs used to be a bit chilly. Dad used to often leave the loft hatch open so that heat from our un-lagged hot water tank could prevent the pipes form freezing. He was overly concerned about burst pipes and flooding. The loft wasn’t insulated either and I’m pretty sure today’s enviromentalist nut-jobs would have a fit at all of this. As an ex-miner there was a pretty good supply of coal so he didn’t seem concerned about keeping a good fire going and letting the heat go through the roof. Things were different back then I’ll say.

A warm blanket It is my opinion that in a cold room you’re much better off under a sheet and some layers of blankets than you are under one thick duvet. In fact people in the know will often tell you to wrap up with lots of thin layers rather than one thick jumper. Presumably this has a lot to do with trapping layers of air close to your body. I vaguely remember being told at school that it was the holes in a jumper which kept you warm, which basically makes Rab C Nesbitt the smartest man in Scotland!

I don’t remember every being cold once tucked up in my worn out old saggy bed under a pile of blankets. They may have felt a bit heavy at time and got in a bit of a mess by morning but I was never left shivering. If it got cold it was simply a case of dragging another blanket on top. I vaguely remember the average being about 3 or 4 in the winter with some slightly course (in the days before fabric softener) multi-coloured pin stripe sheets. Sheets were sometimes a pain because we didn’t have the fitted kind.

Come to think of it I remember the patterns and colours of these blankets as if it were yesterday. The purple, blue and greenish coloured one, quite thin but soft and it looked nice on the top. Then there was the black ones with orange and yellow squares that used to go on the two single beds in the back room. There was also an assortment of orange and pink ones that were quite thick but also very course, definitely the filling in the blanket sandwich!

A bed made up of blankets and sheets is also far easier to make to begin with than getting a duvet into a duvet cover. I’ll admit that a duvet is much more convenient the next morning though, you can simply pull it straight and off you go whereas with the traditional bed, the sheets always end up tangled and because the bedding is so heavy it’s hard to get it all straight without completely re-making it again.

So there you go. For warmth it’s blankets and sheets any day, for convenience there’s the duvet. I do really miss the former though, there’s something about the experience. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of being a bairn and as we get older we like to look back on those times.

Are sheets and blankets warmer than a duvet?

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