Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet? I ask because there is a must-have item for 2022 that may have so far escaped your attention. And that’s a small irony because at some point in the weeks ahead it will almost certainly be staring you in the face.
Whether you’re reading A Christmas Carol and enjoying John Leech’s illustrations, or relishing in the monochrome horror of Alastair Sim in Brian Desmond Hurst’s gothic version of 1951, or enjoying once again Michael Caine’s peerless performance in the Muppets’ musical adaption, you will notice that one of Ebenezer Scrooge’s nocturnal accessories is never missing: the nightcap.
You don’t have to be a miser to see the benefit of this piece of forgotten headgear. With Britain facing recession, rampant inflation, a cost-of-living crisis and nightmare-inducing energy prices, a comfortable means of keeping your bonce warm while the home around you freezes in the middle of the night is surely a common-sense solution merely awaiting rediscovery.
Why rely on the government’s energy price cap when you can rely instead on a cap of your own?
So here’s a revolutionary thought. Why not get the hard-to-buy-for male relative in your life a nightcap for Christmas? It may not give your father, uncle, son or brother as much of a thrill as the latest must-have sporting biography, but it will keep their heads warm, which is more than can be said for Being Geoffrey Boycott.
Or perhaps this might be the ideal festive gift for yourself, regardless of your sex. After all, when the beast from the east comes to stay, keeping our head warm isn’t stupid, it’s essential. As any former Scout will tell you, we lose 70 per cent of our body heat through our heads, and while I think that claim doesn’t stand up to much scientific scrutiny, the spirit of it is irrefutable. And unless you sleep with a duvet over your head, how else do you keep your brain-department up to temperature?
All right, one option is to keep your heating switched on at a low level all the time, but that’s about as affordable as a cup of tea and slice of cake at a branch of Caffè Concerto in central London. Moreover, as the helpful blokes on the box say, getting through the energy crunch is about heating the person, not the room. Which is something that most of us understood in those dim distant days before the advent of central heating and efficient gas fires in our bedrooms.
According to the Manchester Art Gallery, which contains the Gallery of Costume, nightcaps were worn in Britain from the 16th to the 18th centuries, particularly by men who would have been bewigged during the daytime.
The last time I looked there wasn’t a cure for male pattern baldness (apart from flying to Turkey for an operation that makes you look like the Forestry Commission is your barber), and while I’ve still got hair, there’s less of it than there used to be. So a few weeks ago, as the weather grew colder, I resorted to wearing a woollen or cotton cap – a beanie – in bed. It’s not enormously sexy, but it keeps me warm, and anyway we have two boys under six, so the cap really is the least of my concerns. And I can tell you this: it’s incredibly effective.
So, fingers crossed, if I’m lucky, Father Christmas will get the hint and give me a soft-cotton, full-on Scrooge-like nightcap this year. I see that a firm called Woods of Shropshire sell them in a variety of colours and styles for £14.95, which might be just the Ebenezer.
Have a look for yourself and put it on the Christmas list. After all, why rely on the government’s energy price cap when you can rely instead on a cap of your own? Who knows – perhaps by next year, if the heating bills keep going as they have been, we’ll all be eyeing up four-poster beds with curtains on them too.
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