A wooly night time incident

Don't be fooled into thinking that it's always hot and sunny in Tuscany; it's been raining for so long here that the plants in my garden are actually rotting. Walking across my lawn is like walking on a three foot deep muddy sponge and my neighbour has a pump going 24/7 to try to clear our flooded cellar. It's also pretty chilly and I've got into the very old lady habit of always taking a hot water bottle to bed. Hot water bottles rock in the winter. Especially if you're as tight-fisted as I am about turning on the heating.

I got into knitting last year and the first thing I knitted (apart from a predictable succession of scarves) was a nice wooly hot water bottle cover. It's red and I even experimented with the knit and purl stitches to create a kind of chequered effect. Very nice. I didn't know how to close it around the top so I just stitched it in and now if I ever want to take it off I'll have to cut it. My Other Half is terrified that if I knit him a jumper, I'll just knit him into it and he'll have to wear it forever like the poor hot water bottle. In his worst nightmares he wakes up to find that I've knitted him into a wooly straight-jacket.

The other night, I was snuggling down in bed with a book and my trusty hot water bottle when my Other Half trundled into the bedroom. He clambered into bed, causing the usual freezing drafts as he flapped the duvet around for no reason, before finally settling down and starting to read. Out of the blue and without moving a muscle above the duvet, he stole the hot water bottle from around my ankles with his great knobbly size 46 feet. I was flabbergasted. He didn't even look at me as he commited this most heinous of bedtime crimes. I looked at him. Nothing. Fuming, but not sure what to say, I stared blankly at the pages of my book. After a couple of minutes he glanced at me innocently and said,
'No hot water bottle tonight?'
I stared at him. Was this a trick question?
'Er, yes, and you stole it from me as soon as you got into bed.' Ha, you can wipe that innocent look off your face buddy.
'What?' He replied, suddenly fidgeting his feet around at the bottom of the bed. 'Oh,' he said, reddening, 'I thought that was your foot.'
He had mistaken the wooly and boiling hot water bottle for my foot. What's a girl to do?

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