Heat

A picture of a fine piece of weather art, that is to say a work of art which is made by carving out a interesting lump of tree with a chain saw and then leaving the lump to weather to something even more interesting. One can then dilate, Guardian fashion, on the various beauties of the grains and textures so exposed. Perhaps project all kinds of fancies onto the thing, rather in the way that one does with clouds.

The connection with heat being that the picture was taken in the garden during a stay in the Spa Hotel at Tunbridge Wells (http://www.spahotel.co.uk/), a stay which reminded us of the difficulty that hotels seem to have with temperature control in their bedrooms.

We start with a bedroom with a very high ceiling (high enough for a chandelier to look good) and windows which opened, which together provided some compensation for the fact that the air conditioning control unit did not appear to allow one to allow the temperature to fall below 18C. Not that we got so far as to find the explanatory leaflet for the control unit, let alone read and absorb it. We only got as far as thinking that 18C is several degrees above the setting on our own control unit at home - and, as the climate changesayers keep telling us, several degrees can make a whole world of difference.

Then the bed was equipped with a duvet which did not look too thick for the start of autumn and, in practise, the duvet was just about OK provided one was not running hot. The fine control of sticking an arm or a leg out from under in order to lower the temperature inside was enough. But when one was running hot, perhaps because one was over tired or had taken on too much freight in the preceding twelve hours, the duvet was too hot. Asleep, the only answer was to chuck the thing off altogether and after a while one woke up too cold. A cycle which was apt to repeat through the night.

For some reason, we did not attempt to take the duvet out of its bag and use the bag as a blanket, a device to which we have had successful recourse in the past.

Nor did we attempt to extract top sheet and thin blanket from the hotel housekeepers, there being nothing of that sort in the room. Nor did we have the coats or dressing gowns to hand with which we might have achieved the same end, albeit in a rather untidy way.

Perhaps with more practise we would have got there; got the amount of window opening and curtain drawing adjusted so that the resultant temperature in the bedroom suited the thickness - or perhaps togness - of the duvet. But in the time available we did not. Perhaps, given that the temperature outside tends to fall during the course of the night, we never would have. And it remains a puzzle why so many otherwise satisfactory hotels fail on this score.

Are we all victims of some drive to save on the energy costs involved in air conditioning that works?

PS: there was, to be fair, a plus in all this. We were not lying awake listening to the noise of the air conditioning, something which one can do quite a lot of in quite a lot of the newer hotels. And, in most other respects, an entirely satisfactory stay, including one rather good dinner in their rather grand dining room - not yet swept away in some hotel adviser driven makeover.