Last night, in the middle of a serious bout of insomnia, I started hearing noises in the house. I wasn’t scared; it wasn’t like footsteps, or doors opening; it was a steady clicking or tapping, like something was in the walls tapping on the studs. I got out of bed (I was wide awake, why not go on a wild goose chase in the wee small hours?) and wandered about until I realised it was the towel rail, turning itself on for no apparent reason. The only reason it even occurred to me to check the bathroom was that two days earlier, in the middle of the afternoon, I walked into the bathroom and accidently touched the rail, and got quite the start when it was burning hot for the first time in over three months.
I really have not mastered Britain’s heated towel rails at all. I honestly thought they were just to warm towels. I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but for the entire year that I lived in my first house in Kirkwall, I thought my bathroom had no actual heating – it simply never occurred to me that the towel rail was the heating. (I even went so far as to write my landlord to say I couldn’t find the thermostat for the bathroom, did they know where it was. They never replied.) I would turn the rail on just before a shower to heat my towel, then leave it on another hour to dry said towel, then turn the rail off. I spent an entire year thinking I had a freezing cold bathroom. I lived with it.
The rail here is different in that it doesn’t have an on/off switch. It seems to be connected to the overall heating system for the house, which I turned off in mid-May, as the weather was warm enough. Yet all of a sudden, in the middle of August, the towel rail has taken to turning itself on and off, intermittently and without warning. I’m not sure why – the radiators thoroughout the rest of the house are still off (I know; I went to each room at 3:47 this morning touching them to make sure).
So at least now I know that as autumn approaches, I will have a decently warm bathroom. And once I figure out why it is the only heating element in the house that is currently working, I’ll factor it back into the overall climate control system.
Speaking of heating elements, did I mention how hot the entire rail itself actually gets? This is a series of metal bars, heated to burning point, left uncovered, in a room in which floors can be wet and slick, and in which people are often naked. Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.