In Search Of Heat.

Heat! Glorious heat! Finally I have spent the most wisely invested £30 in my life. It comes in a little plastic box and warms every nook and cranny of my student accommodation. For the majority of people my student room is something they will never see, so let me describe its third world likeness. There are draughts, and by draughts I mean ones that manage to deplete the whole room of any shred of heat. The one radiator that I can call my own is timed. Timed it would seem to the perfect “irritation level”. When a button is pressed it slowly gathers momentum, and after 15 minutes or so it becomes warm. But at 20 minutes it switches itself off again. Losing all its heat within less than three minutes. So if you forget to press the button within this time space your back to square one. Presumably this function is to be green and save the polar bears and all that jazz. This, I think, is a good thing. I like polar bears, they’re cute. But the weather in London these past few days has been biblically cold. Wind that would cut through bone given half the chance, and ice replacing most of the pavements. So to rectify this predicament I marched out into the outside freezer in search of a fan heater, without a green conscience.

Where does one go for such a gizmo? Well, there’s only one answer. Argos. The land of everything you never knew you needed until you did. Shopping there is a somewhat depression thing. For those of you who haven’t had the misery of using one of its stores, there are no items of the shelves. Oh no, that would be too simple. Instead you plough threw a grubby urine stained catalogue in search of what you want. Then when you’ve found something that closely resembles your desires you input the catalogue number on a little computer panel to see if there are any in stock. I did just this and got the message “Sorry, this product isn’t in stock.” “Ok” I thought. I’ll try another one. “Sorry, this product isn’t in stock.” Hmmmm. I repeated this for every single heating device. Nope. Not one. Regardless of how much money I was going to through at them, they didn’t have anything! I leave as a disgruntled human being in search for another one of these ‘digit input metropolis’s’. Three tube stops later I found one. The first thing I noticed about this store was the smell of those already inside. Unphased by this I repeated the same process as I did in the previous store. I can’t believe it. Same message for everything. “Sorry not in stock.” I was suddenly struck by the idea, what if I wasn’t a twenty year old male, in peak physical fitness....What if instead I was a little 80 year old woman with arthritis called Dorothy? After walking enough distance to cause my bones to turn to dust, providing I didn’t slip on any ice, I’d be going home empty handed and with a louder creak in my knee caps. This simply isn’t fair. How stupid have you got to be not to sell things your customers want?

Walking back in more of a huff than before I come across a small independent electronic store. The sort filled with cheap plastic Korean imitations of cheap plastic Chinese products. Well, given my situation I wasn’t really in a position to complain if the heater I ended up with had a possibility of spitting out molten parts of its innards at me. There they were. A pile of boxed fan heaters all over priced and under speced. With reluctance I walk in slow motion to the till with one and hand him my credit card.

Having had it now for only a day I couldn’t be more pleased. I’m warm within seconds without a hint of anything from within being spat out at me. Yet even now, all warm and toasty with mamma cass on the hi-fi, I can’t help but wonder about all those poor Dorothy’s. If they haven’t found one after a log search, chances are they’re going to go to sleep cold. And that’s a thought that doesn’t sit well with me. So pull your finger out Argos! Replenish your frankly laughable stocks of heaters because you’re killing our Dorothy’s.