In Honour of My Bed

This post is a tribute to my bed.

Not only because my bed is one of my favourite places to be, but also because for me it has come to symbolise autonomy, freedom, and comfort. It tells a story about my life.

When Mr S finally left the family home, one of the first things I decided to do was re-decorate. I dipped into my savings and bought new sofas. I spent many a happy hour amongst the tester pots at B and Q - and having finally decided on a colour - repainted the living room. I bought great swathes of beautiful luxurious silk and harangued my poor mother into making new curtains for me. I also repainted the bedroom and changed all the furniture in it around.

Unfortunately (for me) Mr S had had a tendency to lose practically half his body weight in sweat every night - to the extent that his side of the bed would often be wringing wet by the time morning came. We slept on a futon (having been under the impression when we bought it that they were terribly good for your back) and as I'm sure you can imagine, after six years, the mattress was in a fairly nasty state. Riding high on my new found wave of freedom, I decided on a whim one day to chuck it out and buy a new one. How hard can it be, thought I. It's only a futon mattress, I'll just roll it up, put it in the back of the car and drive it down to the tip. Easy peasy.

And so began a truly slapstick mission, which involved lugging the mattress off the bed, realising immediately that actually it weighed a bleeding ton, dragging it to the top of the stairs and pushing it down - very nearly sliding head first after it - opening my front door, and proceeding to wrestle it out into my front garden. By which time of course I'd gone too far to turn back. I was damned if I was going to let some stinky mattress get the better of me.

Did I forget to mention that I have the smallest three door car in the world? There were some builders working on the roof of the house opposite who actually stopped what they were doing in order to openly watch me grapple Laurel and Hardy style with this dead weight of a futon mattress, which now appeared to have inexplicably grown to twice its size, somewhere between the bedroom and the front garden.

So mustering all the dignity I could, I opened my car door, pushed the front seat forward, and set about getting the mattress into the car. I must have utilised almost every single body part in this endeavour (much to the amusement of the onlooking builders) pushing and pulling with my entire weight to try and squish the bugger onto the back seat. Eventually it was all in and taking up every inch of available space inside the car as if it had suddenly and miraculously inflated. I managed to just about squeeze into the drivers seat and set off, completely illegally and very slowly (I couldn't see anything out of the rear view and not much out of the sides) down the back roads to the tip. I fancy the builders clapped as I went.

I managed to arrive without incident at the tip and park next to the appropriate skip, only to begin the whole process again in reverse. This time it was the tip workers turn to stare in a vaguely amused manner as I wrestled, yanked and swore, trying to get the godforsaken thing back out of my car. Eventually I prevailed and dragged it over to the skip in order to set about heaving it over the side. The dull triumphant thud as it finally landed in the giant bin was the sweetest sound I had heard in an age.

I got back into my car and drove to the nearest bed selling superstore. I spent a small fortune on a luxury memory foam mattress which was neatly rolled up in vacuum packed plastic so I could take it home straight away. I went to another shop and bought new bedding. New everything, even down to the mattress protector. Beautiful crisp white cotton sateen sheets and duvet covers with a 400 thread count - the best I could afford. Singing along to the radio, I drove home and made my new bed.

It is gorgeous. And it is mine.


Reading this post back, I am struck by how much it appears to reveal about my personality. I am not always the most sensible of people I'm afraid, and I can be rather impulsive at times. I often make mistakes. I am however extremely resourceful, quite determined, and I generally have faith in myself that I will get there in the end, and get there off my own steam.

So with this in mind I am asking: Which one of your posts do you think says the most about you? Feel free to leave a link in the comments - I would really love to read it.