We've been waiting a good while for our new bed to arrive (I bought it back in mid-July) and because we've been sleeping in the spare room it hasn't quite felt like we're properly home yet, but today finally our wait was ended. It's massive and it's brilliant.
I hadn't been looking forward to constructing it as my memories of doing this in the past is that it was pretty hard (though mainly because I tried to do it alone) but the delivery men were great. "Are we putting this together for you," one of them asked.
"Not as far as I know," I said.
"We can if you like," came the reply. They were volunteering for extra work and they didn't even want a cup of tea as a reward. I may discover down the line that I have been charged £200 for this service (or have my dealings with the evil Harpenden lettings agency made me cynical), but it might be worth it. My wife and I would have sweated and toiled and argued if we'd done it ourselves and it would have been like sofagate all over again. This time my lack of masculinity did not have to be put on display to the entire world. Plus I had a big fuck off bed with a brand new mattress to jump up and down on. I am the king of the world.
The bed is such an important time of furniture. I love sleeping and I love having sex in a comfortable environment where I can immediately fall asleep and also it's a good place to watch TV, read the paper or make a Dutch oven. Also have a wank. And I was looking forward to doing all these things, preferably simultaneously in the first 10 minutes of owning a new bed.
I have now bought three beds in my life (I still own them all). The first saw me through from 1998-2003, the second 2003-2012, and now this new one, which might conceivably take me through to the end of my life. On this bed of death what dreams may come?
If it turns out to be my last bed then there's a reasonable chance I will die in it. And now there's almost a zero chance of me dying in the bed I slept in last night. It's thoughts like this that ironically keep me awake at night.
I like the idea of turning my spare bedrooms into museums of the younger me. Perhaps I should decorate each room with the posters and the furniture that I had when those beds were in use. And maybe a waxwork dummy of me from those times or a video display of me talking about the dreams, the Dutch ovens and the other adventures I got up to in them (it will be mainly about wanking, but that will be of interest to certain tourist). Maybe I could set up a Richard Herring fan B&B experience where you get to spend a night as the me of a certain age, wearing my clothes and doing the things I would have done in those rooms. And then in the morning you get served breakfast by the modern day me?
I know my mum and dad have done this in their Cheddar home. Look them up in the Yellow Pages. You can go to my teenage bedroom and sleep in the tiny single bed that I slept in back then (and occasionally still do sleep in when I go back home if the house is full) surrounded by posters of Frank Worthington covering spy-holes into my sister's bedroom (please watch Headmaster's Son DVD for context) and the old style massive gramophone which I used to hide a copy of Fiesta in - it's still there for you to read the story about the next door neighbour with nipples the size of walnuts (that real detail just came back to me). I think she also says "It'd be a shame to waste that" - that reader's letter is fresher in my mind than the last book I read.
It's quite a niche market for a B&B but luckily there are a steady supply of borderline psychotic freaks out there who are happy to pay for this service. Not so much for the Richard Herring associations, but because they've heard about the Fiesta.
I'd quite like to see that magazine again, for old time's sake. There should be an online archive of these mags for old men like me to take a nostalgic trip back to these coming-of-age (literally) moments. But I just googled "Fiesta nipples the size of walnuts" and ended up
here. Which weirdly enough, given how jaded I have become and my need for ever more extreme and disgusting porn did the job for me.
But I digress. The new bed is amazing and comfortable and the size of a small island and I slept very well, feeling happy to be properly back in our room. The house now feels like our house and this is very much properly our bed. I am going to stipulate in my will that if I die my wife will get my first best bed (so take that Shakespeare), but also that there has to be a waxwork of me in it and she has to set up the B&B idea. Or if I do die in the bed maybe she could just leave my corpse in there (maybe embalmed, maybe not) - it'd be a talking point. And probably knowing my fans, much, much more than that.
