Well, let's consider my all time Top-Ten Things that infuriate me! I refer, of course, to all things associated with Bedding!
Right up there, – alongside those devil-spawned giant toilet-paper dispensers that turn sensible women into broken-nailed, scrabbling, damp groined, demented and slavering fools is The Duvet Cover!!
Oh that damned giant bag! It turns me into a clenched-jawed bag! And you don't need Perfect Housewife Anthea Turner, (just what exactly is her talent anyway?……….don't answer that!) who leaps lightly onto the bed, flicking the duvet into its bag with the ease normally reserved for putting a quarter of mint imperials into a sweetie bag! It is not that way for most of us. Oh no! There are many approaches to this hideous problem.
There's the “Lay the Cover on the Bed” approach whereby one takes the duvet's top corners and aims for the cover's top two corners by the pushing, shoving, zigzagging maneuver that results merely in a lump of duvet on one side and a sudden absence now of three corners.
There's the “Turn the Cover Inside Out” approach in which (theoretically) we easily and without loss of breath, grasp a couple of corners into corresponding corners of the cover, a quick flip! and there you are!
Ah, there you are with yer head inside the cover, nicely cushioned by the naked duvet itself and neither hand free to wipe your nose!
And whilst we're on the Duvet Wagon woe betide the careless, slapstick slattern of a housewife who fails to close those press studs before washing! Such a failure is punished by the relocation of all your other washing into the duvet cover, providing a ginormous balloon of entangled laundry that whangs around the machine causing euros worth of damage during the thumping spin cycle!
Let us not leave the subject of Beds without sparing some thoughts pretty gruesome thoughts- for The Fitted Sheet! Who the hell invented this Ironer's Nightmare? O.K, I will accept (don't accuse me of being unreasonable!) that it is a boon for the world's bed-makers, offering that smooth, simple cover, easily applied to the mattress and providing us with the illusion that our skin flakes and sweat have not actually penetrated the mattress that should have been replaced 15 years ago anyway……..
I am one the World's Blessed People who loves ironing. (Oh, shut up!) I adore being bracketed by the mound of creased and tangled linen on one side and the neat piles of sweet-smelling, ironed linen on the other side. Not too fond of the Putting Away part of the procedure, but give me an ironing board and the Archers' Omnibus and I'm in seventh heaven! However & Notwithstanding! How the Sodding hell to iron and fold a fitted sheet so that it retains the pristine perfection I have just created for it is a mystery that all the resources of Radio Four cannot solve.
On this tantalizing note Night-Night. Sleep tight!
janekirkspain@gmail.com
