I love bed. I love my bed so much that my two- and four-year-old both refer to it as ‘the mummy bed’. I was trying to make ‘the marshmallow castle’ take off, but it turns out I am a key part of ‘the bed experience’ – in that, if you can’t find me, that is where I will be, starfished.
When my son learned to climb out of his cot (a recent development which I relish about as much as you can imagine), I’d hear him shuffling into my room every night, whispering ‘mummy bed’ into my desperate, semi-slumbering ear. It’s true that I spend a lot more time in bed than my husband, which is why it has been re-branded, a little to his chagrin, as solely mine.
Since I was seven years old and it was lined with beanie babies and Enid Blytons, bed has been my safe place: where I convalesce from a terrible day, where I head to read whenever I possibly can. Last year, I bought a reading chair for my sitting room – a big, squashy, white linen one – and yet, within 10 minutes of setting myself up there, I find myself sloping back to bed with a pile of books.
What's everyone reading?
My bed is a majestic thing. It’s the only item in our bedroom which isn’t secondhand – a Super King with a buttoned headboard covered in Pierre Frey’s jumping horses fabric. It has a few sticky fingerprints on it now (like the whole of my house), but it’s still one of my favourite things I own. In fact, my favourite rooms in my house are all bedrooms. Not just my own, but my children’s too. I find something deeply satisfying about the arrangement of a bed, bedside table and chest of drawers, the curation of small sitting corners.
My second favourite place in the house after my own bed is my daughter’s rickety little iron one (I think my husband put it together wrong as it creaks like an octogenarian every time you breathe). When she isn’t there, I like to lie in it alongside the scratchy sequined mermaid and take pleasure in the Ottoline wallpaper and the colourful cosiness of her trinkets. Sometimes I read in there. Sometimes, at night, I fall asleep in it with her. I’ve even been known to nap in my son’s cot, albeit under duress. But neither bed, obviously, can compare to my own.
That’s not to say that I’ve always had a pleasant experience with bed. In fact, it has been a place of torment. During insomniac spells, I have tossed and turned in that dratted marshmallow castle, my pillows like skinny cats, my duvet a pile of twisted guts. Frequently I leave the site of oppression for a new room, where I may read until sleep descends around 7am. There is nowhere nicer than bed at 7am.
I once took part in a feature for a newspaper where an expert told me I would sleep better if I re-cast my bed as somewhere for ‘sleep and sex’ only. No reading? No roly-polies with my children? Were they joking? I threw the paper straight in the bin with a ‘pah’ of disgust. Anyone who tells me that bed is only a functional thing, that it isn’t a place for comfort, books and family, is of no use to me.
I’m far from alone in seeing bed as my sanctuary and salvation, but this is a relatively recent thing: until the 1980s and much later for many people, it was seen as an extraordinary expense to have central heating upstairs, which meant that languishing in bed was simply too cold an activity.
The modern configuration of homes as something more open plan has also led to an increased emphasis on bed, as often the only private space in the house. It is a luxury to have your own bedroom as a child, but an essential one in flat shares, where you many not particularly know (or love) your housemates. I know of people who watch all their films in bed, work in bed, eat in bed – anything to avoid being in a shared space with Glen who eats noodles with his bare hands and stores some in his beard for snacking later.
I try not to do any of those things because I like to protect my bed as a precious space. Being prescribed ‘bed rest’ is possibly my greatest fear. If it became my dining table and desk, I fear the marshmallow castle would not hold the same delicious appeal. And delicious, it really is.
On a hellish 25-hour journey recently, the only thing that kept me going (aside from the fact the my children, thankfully, were not with us) was the thought of my bed, with its egg-yolk-coloured, scallop-trimmed Cologne & Cotton sheets and it’s messy pile of goose down pillows. As soon as we got through the front door, I face-planted into my safe place. Grounded, rooted, reunited. I love bed.
