I love my bed!

Getting out of bed in the morning is the most difficult thing I have to do every single day. After I’ve managed to pry open my eyelids and dampened down the negative thoughts (Why me? Nothing is worth this! I hate mornings!) I then slide my feet out and place them on the floor where I look at them, as if for inspiration, from my newly upright position while getting used to the feeling of being part of the universe once more.

I’m turning into my mother, of course, a woman who had two modes of being: out shopping or home in bed. When her grandson, Oisín, caught sight of her bounding up the stairs one afternoon he was flabbergasted; he had never before seen "Granny-up-in-bed" outside of her four-poster. Bed was where she directed operations, neat cupboards either side with drawers full of handy bits and bobs, remote controls (TV directly ahead, radio on the shelf to the left), telephone, knitting needles, wool, stamps, notepaper, books, pins, jewellery, comb, hairbrush, lipstick, face cream, curlers, nail scissors, holy water, statue of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, hot water bottles, cards, pens, biros, pencils – the list can never be exhausted. There were many grim evenings when she dropped some vital piece of equipment – usually the remote control – and some poor schmuck would have to forage in the dusty underworld amid all the other lost things until they came up for air, with or without the misplaced object, to cries of, "Oh, you darling!" or, "Look, it was here all the time under my pillow!"

The temptation, when the evenings darken, is to dash upstairs, put on the electric blanket, and snuggle up with a good book. My biggest treat to myself is Egyptian cotton sheets (I have a neighbour who has a laundry service with crisp cotton sheets delivered weekly to her door – class!), four good pillows, a summer and winter duvet (mostly winter with the highest tog rating possible for the Irish chill) and all topped with the patchwork quilt that took me four long years to make. I have my mobile phone, my radio and TV, and piles of books but I promise you, I have not quite turned my bedroom into my office with everything I possess within reach from the depths of my cot!

Imagine my delight when I was given Warm and Snug: A History of the Bed by Lawrence Wright. I could read all about beds through the ages from a Neolithic stone bed unearthed at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands to the bed from Tutankhamen's tomb c.1350BC; from stark Anglo-Saxon to ornate early Renaissance beds and the elaborate State bed chambers of kings. When you think about it, bed is where we spend nearly a third of our lives, (though with my mother I think it was rather more) so why not make it a place of comfort and refuge to which we can retreat whether it is morning, noon, or night?