One of my earliest memories as a child is my little hands plugging in the old electric blanket for my visiting grandmother and then being violently thrown across the room after it short-circuited.

Being electrocuted was a strange and horrible sensation. I don’t even remember crying out as a nasty current ran through my body like I was a human extension cord. I was literally shocked (just as the name of the affliction promised), bewildered that such a thing could happen, staring at the soot on my hands, then up at my ashen grandmother.

It strikes me as strange that decades later, in this time of such enormous technological breakthroughs, Australians in their cold, poorly designed houses still rely on a rubber bag filled with boiling water pressed against their chests, and/or a mesh undersheet with an electric current running through it as their main source of night-time heating.

That some people combine the boiling water rubber bag and the electric current blanket and........

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