Sleeping with the Fan on

In our occasional bouts of very warm weather, we Englishmen have to make a choice: be kept awake by the heat or be kept awake by the noise of a fan. On my recent trip to Oxford I was accommodated in the town centre which made wandering about marvellously convenient but the nocturnal patrons of restaurants and pubs below made much noise as they spilled out to go to their homes or subsequent venues. I therefore put the fan on; if I was to be kept awake by noise, it might as well by fan-noise seeing as I’d have some coolness thrown into the bargain.

My mother emigrated to Australia in 1988. Among other things, she was sick of the British cold and the rain. She therefore refused any air conditioning in her home for the next 34 years of life, as she argued that if she wanted to sit in the freezing cold she could have stayed in England and saved the trouble of moving. There is a certain logic to this, though I would have been given short shrift had I ventured to suggest that she ought not to have taken a shower, on that same basis: if she was so pleased to stand in a spray of water, she could have remained in Lancashire and had a shower for free each time she left the house.

Although she was principled, she was no masochist, and arranged for a fan to circulate her bedroom air. So used to it had she become that she could no longer sleep in a room without the whirring noise. Consequently, she took one with her when she stayed at motels as the want of noise, even if the temperature were agreeable, would prevent sleep. So the sound kept me awake, but that same noise sent her to rest. Bizarre.

Unbelievers, in whose ranks my mother included herself, cannot live with God’s word. They consider it rude, or boring, or judgemental, or irrelevant, or disturbing, etc. They just cannot abide it. I, on the other hand, cannot live without it.