Some things in life you just have to put up with. Bad
drivers; rising inflation; Keith Lemon. Others, you choose to accept for a
while. A leaky roof; the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling; the wonky cupboard
door where the hinge needs replacing. These things can be fixed and probably
will be if you ever get around to it. These are minor irritations in the big
scheme of things (compared to Keith Lemon) but some things around the house
can't wait to be repaired or replaced. A broken toilet; a blown kettle; a
damaged pizza cutter. When they need fixing they need fixing now, and this week I got round to fixing
one of those important things.
Our bed had finally become too soft and saggy to sleep on.
It more resembled a hammock than a mattress, so big was the dip in the middle. I'm all for snuggling up close to the Beloved
of a night time but it's nice to make the choice ourselves and not have the
mattress decide for us. Nobody likes enforced intimacy, least of all the
Beloved. It's been sinking lower and lower in the centre for a while and wasn't
going to heal on its own so we chose not to buy each other a Christmas present
this year. We saved our cash and put it to a joint gift from the New Year Sales.
We managed to find a new mattress for less than thirty
percent of the original label price, a huge bargain which saved us hundreds of
pounds. And it's brilliant, really thick, luxuriant and just the right level of
firmness. It reminds me of a posh hotel room bed. Sadly though my Beloved
doesn't leave mints on the pillow every evening.
We'd had the previous mattress for over a decade so there's
no wonder that it was no longer at its best. It was about half its original
thickness but not consistently so, so it was lumpy and bumpy in all the wrong
places. Its coils were uncoiled, its hexagonal honeycombs had crumbled and its
cover was torn and punctured so that its pointy bits and pieces poked
unpleasantly into mine. The new one is so solid that even with me rolling
around on it all night it holds its shape, and its solidarity has taught me how
bad the previous mattress had become.
I only ever use one pillow. I have done for many years. I
thought I'd just grown to like having only theone, that it was my choice, but
now the reason has become clear. The bed had simply become so saggy that one
pillow raised my head sufficiently. But now that I've re-learned how solid a
mattress should be I've realised that one pillow isn't enough. It leaves my
head sloping back and downwards at a painfully more-than-jaunty angle. So much
so that I'm choking, head back, swallowing my own tongue. Not only that but I'm
also, apparently, snoring though I'm not convinced about that. I certainly
haven't been noisy enough to wake myself. I'm sleeping the best that I have in
a long, long time.
The only problem now is that we have the old mattress to
dispose of. Of course we'll take it to the tip (when we get around to it) but
currently it's still in our bedroom. It's propped up against the wall at the
end of our bed, looming over us while we sleep like some kind of posture-sprung
guardian angel. If it ever decides to flop down on us during the night,
attacking us like a deleted scene from 'Paranormal activity', we may need to
reuse it. It'll be cleaner than the new one will be.
© Shaun Finnie 2014
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