We are having a day of beds.
I do not mean by this that we have been in bed. We have not occupied the day snoozing with our feet up, occasionally pottering downstairs for a cup of tea.
I mean that we have been occupied by bed-related difficulties.
The first thing was that Oliver’s new, considerably larger, grown-up bed arrived this morning. I might add that this caused some panic even yesterday because there were two large sheets of plasterboard standing in the hall. This last sentence does not convey an accurate picture. There were two massive, humongous sheets of plasterboard occupying the entire hallway so that you had to try and make yourself thinner to squeeze past them. Well, I did. Also they shed crumbly bits everywhere.
They had been there for a while, ever since the last time we had saved up enough. Their dusty presence made it impossible even to open the front door, still less lug a large item of furniture past it. They were too big to be moved anywhere, and Mark had to saw them up into the right size bits where they were. After that he and Lucy hauled them up the stairs and we could open the door again, so that was all right, if messy.
The next part of the problem started when the delivery company sent us a text explaining that they were going to drop off the bed somewhere between nine and twelve o’clock. Obviously nine o’clock is not our finest hour, I did not finish working until midnight.
Actually I finished working at about quarter past nine. For the rest of the time I was just sitting hopefully on the taxi rank.
Anyway, determined not to be embarrassed by encountering a delivery man in our dressing gowns, or worse, actually, in the nude, because I had washed our dressing gowns and they were not yet dry, we set an alarm and by nine o’clock we were rubbing sleep out of our eyes and trying to steam them open with coffee.
The next difficulty was that Oliver’s bedroom already had a perfectly functional, if too small, bed in it. Mark had taken this to bits yesterday but it was still there, along with a very great deal of dust that we discovered underneath it.
There was a terrific amount of dust, I am an awful housewife. It had to be swept before it could be hoovered, the cobwebs were just glueing it to the carpet.
I swept it whilst we were having our coffee, and we shoved everything out of the way. Then at half past ten the telephone rang, and it was the delivery man.
He had dropped the bed, he explained, and it had a minor tear in it, so he was going to take it back to the depot and come back another day.
We did not at all like the idea of getting out of bed in the middle of the night twice, so we told him to bring it anyway. When he did I was not surprised that he had dropped it because he hurled it in through the door and scurried away before we even had chance to inspect it.
When we looked it was a noticeable tear, not something that you could just shove up against the wall and forget about, so I emailed the bed-vendor and required a discount. He offered me £25 so I told him he could jolly well come and collect the bed again tomorrow and we would just have a new one.
We put the bed in Oliver’s room anyway, because there wasn’t anywhere else to put it. We will have to lug it back down the stairs tomorrow, or whenever the bed man comes back again, if ever he does.
In order to achieve this we had to remove Oliver’s bed anyway, because there is most definitely not room in Oliver’s bedroom for two beds, even if they were both small ones, which they are not. We were going to put his old bed in the loft, but when we looked it turned out that it was too tall, so Mark had to take the legs out to the shed and saw a bit off them.
After that we took the bed up to the loft and Lucy and I reassembled it whilst Mark nailed the sawn-up plasterboard to the ceiling. He went to get some more after that, which is filling the hall again so I don’t know what we will do if the bed man does come back tomorrow.
Reassembling the old bed was also excitingly problematic, because obviously it didn’t go back together again with any simplicity, even though it had become considerably shorter in the intervening period. Then we piled a huge stack of things on the top of it in an attempt to clear some space, which it didn’t.
The highlight of the whole project was the discovery, in Oliver’s bedroom, of a rather splendid portrait of the dogs, left behind by Oliver’s visiting girlfriend, she is so very clever. It made me very happy indeed, it sums up the very essence of their souls, and I was very glad she hadn’t been able to find the chalk to draw it on his blackboard where it would have been rubbed away.
I do not know why he keeps the chalk under his bed. I found it when we moved the bed.
