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LAST night, I did something I haven’t done for a very long time. I went to bed with, well, with a hot water bottle. I’m not ashamed.

The bitter wind was howling, and I am banished these days to my lair at the top of the house, where my cosy bed lurks in the corner of the office, overlooked prettily by the icy stars. Even were I welcome at the other end of the house, the conjugal container is piled so high by Management, a teacher, with children’s books to be marked and lessons to be planned that there seems little option but to repair to my room and leave her to it. Especially as I have no wish to be listening to the sound of Management’s red pen scrawling across exercise books at 3am.

(Incidentally, this morning I heard David Cameron talking about forcing schools to become academies so he can hand over their control to his business chums, and remove them from the pesky oversight of that old-fashioned democracy thing. Then I heard Labour’s spineless Tristram Hunt abjectly failing to have the guts, conscience or sense to decry Cameron’s privatisation of state education, let alone promise to reverse it. They’re all constantly whining about failing schools, failing teachers, failing pupils, not that they ever mention failing fucking politicians.  I thought: I would drag both of them by their hair to Management’s bedroom to watch her working at three in the morning. And then I would beat them both, very very savagely – not because it’s clever or helpful to do so and certainly not because violence is any sort of answer, but simply because it would give me enormous, profound pleasure. If you gave me the choice between a snootful of Bolivian marching powder with the keys to a room containing the naked writhing bodies of a dozen beautiful women, or a baseball bat with ten minutes in a room with the politicians who force their wretched petty hate-filled target-driven dogma on our children, I’d pick up the baseball bat, I swear to sweet Jesus Christ I’d pick up the baseball bat and I’d make those bastards howl. Howl.)

Now. Where was I?

Ah yes, the hot water bottle. Well, it was cold last night. As I bustled about my room preparing for dreamland, Mozart’s Requiem was on the stereo and that always makes me reflective. So for one reason and another I was thinking of my distant childhood, and it occurred to me that one of the few things that remains to me from those days is a hot water bottle. Not the hot water bottle, you understand, but the existence of one. Much else has gone: toys, teddies, carefree games, a sense of the hugeness of time, endless play, even my mother – but there remains the idea of a hot water bottle.

So I rummaged in the cupboard and found a modern-day hot water bottle that was very much like the hot water bottle in my head and filled it and cuddled its heat to me, inhaling the hot rubbery scent. How nice, I thought, how nice that in my centrally heated world, where the high-tech biomass boiler bubbles away, warming children on Play Stations and the internet, warming Management logging data on her computer, the world just the slightest touch away at the end of my finger, broadband slowly fizzing words and pictures and music into air charged with zeroes and ones, how nice that there is still a hot water bottle.

Tonight, I shall have a hot water bottle again and see if I can conjure my old dreams of what I might want to do when I grow up. I wonder how they’ll compare with what passes for reality.