Part 3 : My Life In Bed

When I was a baby I slept upstairs. Every night before being put to bed I was carried around the room to say goodnight to all my toys and pictures. Goodnight Dinah Duck, Goodnight Freddy Frog, Goodnight Naughty Monkey Christopher. This was how I learned the art of procrastination.

At eleven I had for a short time a bedroom to myself with a double bed. On top of the bed was a rose pink feather quilt, embroidered in silk, which had belonged to my grandmother. Under this quilt I read the one and only Biggles book I was ever to read in my life. I did not like Biggles, nor understand him, but I read the book with a sense of discovering an alien world. This was how I learned the thrill of breaking intellectual boundaries.

As a teenager I had the middle bedroom in a row of three at the back of the house, opening onto a terrace. It was not as nice as it sounds. The lock on the door to the terrace was unreliable and sometimes I heard strange noises at night. One night I was alone in the house and I heard heavy breathing outside. I didn't do anything, but lay in a state of terror while the man breathed heavily for what seemed like hours out there on the terrace. Later I concluded that since I was still alive it had probably been a possum. This was how I learned that those films in which a defenceless young woman is drawn to discover the source of a mysterious sound are unrealistic.

When I was thirty I slept in a campervan for several months with my family. We were on holiday travelling through France, Italy and Greece, and the sleeping arrangements were necessarily precise. The 2 boys slept in tiny hammocks which could only be set up once the table had been folded away. Once they were asleep, we had to perform a series of manoeuvres to set up our double bed in the cabin. This included blowing up by mouth a double lilo. Sleeping on a double lilo taught me many practical lessons in physics.

In the nineties we lived in a large old house on Coolibah Avenue. The main bedroom had an off white shagpile carpet, a ceiling rose, and cracks in the walls which expanded and contracted with the seasons. In this bedroom I experienced the worst toothache I ever had in my entire life. I dealt with it by taking sips of cold water every 5 minutes for the duration of the night. I learned nothing from this, but was soon to learn that root canal work is expensive.

Now I have an elegant bedroom with a bay window that looks out on to the front garden and the road. There is an Animal Hospital on the corner and sometimes I hear the sorowful yelping of dogs. We are close enough to the main road to also hear the wailings of ambulances and fire engines and the rumbling of buses. On the other corner is a MacDonalds Restaurant. It stays open quite late and sometimes I hear at night the sounds of people squabbling over a hamburger. You might expect all these things to have taught me a greater sense of compassion.

They haven't.