CURLED up on the sofa, wrapped in a fleecy blanket and rubbing my hands together to keep warm, I heard a familiar cry as my husband stomped into the living room last night: “It’s like a sauna in here. Can we turn this thermostat down?”

It’s that time of year again, as the temperatures start to dip, the central heating goes on and households across the land are verging on the brink of a new cold war. You turn it up. He turns it down. You turn it up again and the battle of the thermostat commences.

Research conducted by Money SuperMarket has deduced that, on the whole, women like to be warmer than men, with a third of couples rowing over the temperature of the house. Only a third? Having conducted a straw poll of my friends and family, I’d say it was more like 95 per cent.

I know fuel costs money, and the average household spends more than £1,300 on heating. Of course it makes sense to turn it down a little to save some money, not to mention the planet. I, like my husband, watch incredulously as the oil gauge appears to move from full towards empty at an alarmingly fast rate. And I can’t argue with my brother when he says watching the coal fire burning is like watching his money go up in smoke.

But as I shiver in the freezing cold, I’m sure there must be some law about basic human heating rights somewhere. Don’t the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention at least mention it?

My friend Lynne says every time she has broached the subject of turning the heating on, her husband tells her to go and put some warm clothes on, accusing her of being dressed for summer: “Or he tells me I must be coming down with something.”

The fact that so many couples appear to be thermostatically incompatible is rooted in science. Men are less sensitive to drops in temperature, with women nine times more likely to suffer from cold hands and feet, taking longer to warm up again when heating is turned up, according to a study in the Lancet.

Psychologists deduce men value substance over sensation. So heating, which is intangible, is seen as less valuable. Perhaps that is why so many husbands, according to my straw poll, have become self-appointed officers of the “heating police”, regularly patrolling the home, demanding everyone “put on jumpers” and “do some exercise” to keep warm.

Some even resort to underhand tactics. A survey by energy efficiency advisors TheGreenAge found 42 per cent of men turned the temperature down without telling their partner. So you can hardly blame those of us who feel the cold for turning to subterfuge. Another poll by YouGov of 2,000 women found 39 per cent admitted turning the heating up when their partner wasn’t looking. And these are just the ones owning up to it. Jane confesses she and her husband definitely fit the stereotype: “I’m forever finding he has turned the radiators off at the valve to counteract me turning up the thermostat.”

Since my husband and I are total body temperature opposites, our biggest battles are in the bedroom, where he opens windows and throws off the duvet, leaving me to shiver while he blasts off heat like a human furnace. But one friend has come up with a novel solution to restore harmony in the marital bed. Her husband used to complain the memory foam mattress was too hot while she, feeling the chill, hogged the duvet. “So we bought a super king size bed and have two single mattresses to suit each of us in one frame, along with two single duvets of different weights. I also have a blanket on top and a single electric blanket below,” says Caroline.

She does admit that they do still open and close bedroom windows a lot: “I’m always up last, so close them. But everyone’s happy now.” This could just be the way forward.

I’D like to speak up in defence of clowns, who have been getting a bad press lately. When Burko the Clown came to entertain at a birthday party at our house many years ago, he bashed the back of his car reversing out of the drive as the children waved him off. But when he got out to look at it, having first put on his huge clown shoes (“I can’t let the children see me out of my costume”, he told me) he was grinning from ear to ear, making funny faces, entertaining to the last, even though he must have been seething inside. Definitely a good guy.