The planet is running out of oil. So what? The energy crisis doesn't worry me. I've found a new source of heat. The odd thing is that I discovered this because I am an irritatingly fussy dad. (The dictionary definition of "over-protective parent" is simply my name in capital letters).
How fussy am I? When my son was born, I watched him night and day. If he coughed I phoned the World Health Organization and told them to put their best virologists on standby. I studied what came out of his bottom with a medical color chart and an electron microscope. If he slept for a minute longer or shorter than normal, I would summon an ambulance.
But the thing that troubled me most was the way he kicked his blankets off every night, whether the room was boiling or freezing. It became an hourly ritual. He'd spend the whole night kicking his blankets off. I'd spend the whole night putting them back over him. He'd go to sleep with his toes hovering over his face, ready to kick out with both feet at once (I'd like to see Beckham do that).
Well, after the two of us had done this nightly ritual for years, I finally got around to asking a doctor about it. "It's normal," he said. "Young children have the same internal engine as adults, but they have a very small surface area, so they generate a lot of heat."
The truth of this was plain. Every time that child or one of the baby girls who followed him climbed into the parental bed, we quickly got so hot that we joined him or her in the kick-off-the-duvet game.
Anyway, all that was a few years ago. Now the children were no longer babies, I thought my worries about trying unsuccessfully to sleep next to a two-legged oven were over.
But one night recently my youngest child was feeling ill and climbed into our bed. The temperature immediately rose to that of a sauna, despite the fact that it was a cool night. I cranked up the air conditioner to maximum. No effect. After sweating for an hour next to what appeared to be the human torch in teddy-bear pajamas, I got up and went to sleep in her small bed.
The following night, she climbed in again. But this time she had swine flu (well, okay, some sort of fever) which caused her body to increase its heat-generating capacity from that of a steel mill blast furnace to that of the core of the sun.
The room quickly filled with the smell of roasting meat, which I realized was me. The net curtains turned a dry, crackly brown. The smoke alarm went off. The contents of my water glass started to boil. The trees around our block spontaneously burst into flame.
The ice-cap at the North Pole shrank at a visible rate. Glaciers retreated everywhere. Sea levels rose. A major ice-shelf broke free from the Antarctic. Scientists monitoring global warming trends went into a panic.
In the newspaper the next morning, there were the usual articles about oil and climate change. Forget electric cars. If we can harness kid-power, we'll never have to worry about energy again.
The writer is a columnist and journalist.
