Why do hotels love doonas? You’re either too hot or too cold. You might fall asleep with it just about right but then you spend the rest of the night thrashing about trying to adjust your body temperature.

There are some places where a quilt makes sense, and basically that’s anywhere north of Milan or south of Canberra, but they pop up everywhere. I’ve had a quilt on the bed in the Sahara, in subtropical Asia and in palmy Thai island resorts. I just don’t get it.

My wife won’t stand for it. The mere sight of one sends her into a towering rage. If it’s going to be a warmish night she shucks the quilt from its casing and uses that as the night cover, or else calls up housekeeping and gets sheets on the bed.

Quilts, or doonas, make perfect sense for hotels because they cut down on service time. No need to tuck in blankets. Straighten the sheets, waft the quilt over the top and job done. Anything that shaves a few minutes off bed-making time is a win for the hotel.

Worse still, some hotels make do without a top sheet. It’s just you and the quilt on top, and how naff is that? All very well with the home quilt if that’s your thing, but has the cover been freshly laundered?

Another peculiarity is in continental Europe, where your double bed might have two quilts, one per sleeper, and I get that. One might sleep the sleep of angels with the quilt around their neck, the other wants it low and loose, and separate quilts save the middle-of-the-night tug-of-war (it also allows the hotel to easily convert a double room to a twin). Just don’t call hotel reception and complain about it, they won’t know what you’re talking about.

Why? Because Australians are almost alone in calling it a doona; in the rest of the world it’s a duvet – although there are exceptions. Hungarians call it a dunyha, which is pronounced a lot like “doona”, and it’s known by a similar name in a couple of other middle-European languages.

According to the Australian Writers Centre, the name may have come from the Norse word “dunn” or Danish “dyne”, meaning down feathers. Either way, when an Australian company called Kimptons started making them back in the 1970s, “Doona” was the brand they came up with (possibly to sound Swedish at a time when ABBA was topping the charts), and it caught on so broadly it became the generic term we all use today.