Bedding down


We have a working bed again, after three years of gradual collapse.

When we moved from Hong Kong to Singapore, we shipped over our large and very lovely bed. I’d bought it a few years earlier in G.O.D., Hong Kong’s designer furniture emporium, partly because my wife-to-be had pointed out there was storage in it for at least two corpses. What could be more romantic than that?

The bed hinges up to allow access to the underneath, and the mattress sits atop an iron frame and a set of wooden slats to give it springy support. Sadly when it was shipped, several slats broke loose of their mounting points, and as the years went by, more slats broke off until the mattress was a squishy lump that provided no support when you lay on it.

The slats were only secured by plastic brackets with plastic screws, most of which either sheared off, or in a few cases appear to have rotted away. That doesn’t seem like they were made of the most appropriate material for a tropical environment. Every time I looked under the mattress I felt more depressed at the collapse of this previously stout furniture, but as for the last year and a half our daughter has monopolized the bedroom, it wasn’t as if I had many opportunities to sleep on the bed anyway.

Now that she has her own room,it was finally time to get the bed fixed. Today a handy man came round with a drill and lots of screws, and fixed all the slats back in place. They’ll never move again, I hope.

The mattress doesn’t feel quite as wonderful as when I bought it (probably it has suffered just as much as us from this unstable bed experience) but it’s still a great improvement on what went before. As I lie here and fall asleep, I almost want to remain awake just to savour sleeping on a proper bed. Isn’t that confusing?


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