A blanket has been declared critical household infrastructure after providing more consistent reassurance than the annual energy forecast. It will now appear in the home inventory between the roof and the thing that turns the water off.
The blanket's owner, Ruth Ellison, said its responsibilities had expanded beyond looking tasteful on the sofa. It now supports evening productivity, weekend resilience and diplomatic negotiations over whether the heating is on. A second blanket has been requested to improve redundancy, though procurement is waiting for the sale.
Access is governed by a first-shiver policy, with priority given to whoever fetched it from upstairs. Residents may reserve a corner but cannot claim the whole system merely by sitting at an angle. The household's recent attempt to introduce a sharing protocol collapsed when somebody's feet entered the wrong jurisdiction.
Ellison has rejected suggestions that the arrangement is bleak: the blanket has never sent a quarterly price update and has performed reliably during every outage of enthusiasm. Its only disadvantage is that one must eventually stand up. The household has classified this as an external risk, alongside draughts and people who announce that they personally have not put the heating on yet.
