Although I still have a tan, I know summer is over. The siestas have vanished and have been replaced by blankets on the bed. I now have socks on my feet to protect that bit of my ankles not covered by jeans from the draft.

The lovely cool ceramic tiles on the floor that are so easy to sweep and mop have lost their appeal. I shall still keep them clean, of course, because, with no central heating, only one heater and the high cost of electricity, I am about to become a blanket worm.

I achieve this strange metamorphosis by wrapping an army green single blanket around myself. When I am standing up, the blanket reaches chest height, and there is a useful 30 centimetres trailing on the floor. Once I sit down at the desk to work, I manoeuvre the trailing bits of blanket into position so that no cold air can enter the conduit I have just created.

It is a fantastically warm way of working – and because it is so difficult to extricate myself from this delightful wrapping, I sit for long periods at a time without getting up for a break. Flattering it is not. No photographs of me thus dressed exist. I look like a very plump blanket worm which has overdosed on greens.

Which brings me to the other worm connection.  In German, there is a word for a seemingly endless, convoluted sentence: Bandwurmsatz – which. as German words go, is quite short. Literally, it means “tapeworm sentence“.

I have illustrated below the most popular method of dealing with a tapeworm sentence:

That’s right. You chop it in half. And chop it in a few more places too. And move the bits around. Then line them up again. Something like that. You can do it as a blanket worm – or not. It’s up to you.

Allison