The cold persuaded me to unsafely leave the electric blanket cranked up, just while I read a few pages.
Hours later I awoke in a lather like a winceyette-swathed swine flu victim, fighting my way from beneath a collapsed book, feet relentlessly searching for a cool spot on the unelectrified side of the bed.
As my feet scrabbled wildly about, I thought if I didn't know better, I'd suspect I was a spinster. Woman on the downhill slope of life, winceyette, reading in bed with only the single electric blanket to rely on for warmth.
The black cat might have made the picture complete, but she was downstairs huddling over the fading embers of the fire.
If, in its purest form, spinster means a never married woman, why is it only applied to those accused of frumpiness? Why is 47-year-old Scottish singer Susan Boyle a spinster, but other supposed celebrities, including Kylie Minogue (now an old maid in her 40s), never referred to thus?
Call someone a spinster and it conjures up an image of a crabbed old biddy in a misshapen cardie who only unpurses her lips long enough to pass judgement on the sins of the young'uns, particularly their child-rearing practices.
Labels for women seem to carry connotations that masculine ones (at least those publishable in a family newspaper) do not.
The term "mother" might not usually be derogatory, but pop an "unmarried" or "single" in front of it and suddenly it becomes an excuse for all that has gone wrong with society.
Even the green movement has not done much to make the earth mother concept more desirable, with its visions of a dowdy-dressing, perpetual breast-feeder likely to pester you with endless tales of the evils of white flour.
Someone recently told me, after discovering I have been known to hurtle around on the back of motorbikes, that he could see me as a biker chick.
Are you mad? I wanted to ask. Since he has not clapped eyes on me for about 30 years, he may be labouring under some delusion that once I might have looked good in leathers. He is wrong. Bike leathers highlight any flaw in the female body and those women who wear them well are rare birds indeed.
I have a potentially sexier motorbike outfit. One which acts like a corset and with so many Velcro bits I could unwittingly enter a new relationship with anybody unlucky enough to be next to me in any queue.
Women in their 50s are not chicks either (apologies to Christine Rankin, whom I heard describe herself on radio once as a "rugby chick").
We are more like the old boilers whose scratching around in the backyard is tolerated because nobody quite knows what to do with us.
And if I must be a bird on the back of a bike, I think I am some elderly parrot - clinging on to the perch for dear life, screeching the odd unprintable remark as my life is endangered.
Unmarried women of my age in relationships with men, other than toy boys, may also struggle with descriptions.
Calling him a lover sounds as if you might be trying to star in your own literary novel, the one you have never got around to writing.
"Shagner" was a term I read of once, but even grown-up children have delicate sensibilities. There is also the risk of being misunderstood by bird fanciers.
The ubiquitous "partner" is problematic. What sort of partner - a dance partner, business partner, partner in crime?
If you don't live with him, partner sounds silly. Mate is out, too, since that ad connected it with having too many pointless one-syllable conversations at the pub and then drink-driving.
Boyfriend is not really the term for someone who has a beer gut, a mid-life crisis Harley-Davidson and hair which gravity has shifted from the top of his head to his ears, eyebrows and nostrils.
Perhaps he could be a RapBAGOM (Rapidly Becoming A Grumpy Old Man) or an OGUTAT (Old Geezer Unable to Attract Twenty-something).
While I lay there thinking all this and panting like a broken-winded racehorse, I felt a stab of sympathy for Susan Boyle as she entered the Britain's Got Talent final. My hopes she wouldn't win (because that way she might have some chance of a more sensible life) were later realised.
Maybe she will never have to reveal what spinster may mean to her - Sexy Person INside Struggling To Escape Reality, perhaps?
As I eventually drifted off to sleep I was thinking about being a widow. Was I a Whinging Idiotic Demented Old Woman or a Wonderfully Intelligent Dynamic On-to-it Wiz? When I found myself imagining I should let the offspring decide, I knew the cold was getting to me at last.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
