In this house, Saturday is clean bedding day. Apart from today. Clean bedding Saturday is postponed for Sunday this week because I forgot to wash last week’s bedding and only subjected it to the boil wash today.

Why bother? There’s only me and the little dog who appreciate the crispness of the linen. There’s nobody else to grimace at the week old shabbiness. Essentially, unless you follow the standard of the weekly bedding change, you’re a scumbag. What follows is downward spiral in personal hygiene; showering on alternate days, wearing yesterday’s clothes, eating out of bins… or from the local pizza/kebab/burger/curry takeaway.

So because I like myself and I love my sleeping environment more than just about anywhere else in the house (with the exception of the smoking bench), the bed gets changed once a week.

But with singledom comes the utter misery of folding bedding on my own.

Engaging with a kingsize duvet cover is fairly traumatic, but there are straight edges that can be aligned and with the innovative use of the washing line or dining chair, it doesn’t take too long to perfect a method of getting the thing folded into something that resembles a folded piece of bed linen. Pillow cases are obviously a doddle. But the fitted sheet fills me with utter dread. It’s like doing battle with a huge nappy. Even the strategic use of the double washing line and several pegs results in failure when it comes to this particular piece of elasticated nightmare.

I’ve come to the conclusion that single people should sleep in single beds to save themselves this weekly torture. If you sleep in a single bed, you’re never going to be inviting anybody back to your place for a night of intimacy. Yet the double bed lures you into a false sense that one day, yes you, one day, you might take somebody to your boudoir in the throes of passion, only to have the moment destroyed as you throw back the duvet to reveal the horror that is the crumpled mess residing beneath. Those creases, they form a malevolent grin that mocks you. The passion dies and you’re left with the one option of crawling under your own bed in shame.

I exaggerate of course, and nothing, absolutely NOTHING, can be worse than throwing back the top sheet of a bed in a holiday villa to reveal this:

Wet
Me and the Little Dog have come to bed slightly wet, well soaked. The recent hot weather has finally been broken by torrential rain that trying its best to repair the damage to my patch that was inflicted through lack of hose-attention this past week.

After a day of being threatened by clouds, the heavens have opened and vertical rain is lashing the parched earth. The enjoyment of my bedtime cigarette was curtailed by, well, getting piss wet through. I didn’t mind it though and re-enacted the scene from Shawshank Redemption when Andy escapes from the sewage pipe into the storm. Then a load of hair product ran into my eyes and made them sting. They never show that in the bloody films, do they?

Sleepiness engulfs me. A day of doing nothing has taken its toll. I shall drift off to the sound of the rain and take with me the most beautiful thoughts in the hope that they come and meet me in Dreamland.