Opinion

Anita Robinson: Changing the duvet has become a king-sized challenge

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;; ">When you marry a six-footer, you need a king size bed</span>
When you marry a six-footer, you need a king size bed When you marry a six-footer, you need a king size bed

East, west – home’s best. There’s nowhere like your own bed. I left for Christmas having stripped mine without making it up again.

I had a lovely time with Daughter Dear, who’s inherited my mother’s obsession with household hygiene – a trait that skipped a generation where I was concerned. She’s become an ardent disciple of ‘Mrs Hinch’, the latest blonde and glamorous iteration of Aggie and the Other One who used to mortify the slovenly on television by invading their houses to reveal their domestic shortcomings and carry out a forensic bacteria-busting exercise not seen since Hercules’ cleansing of the Augean stables.

‘Mrs Hinch’ has written a hefty tome on how to clean a house properly. It includes daily and weekly housework schedules and a guide to the best products for optimum hygiene and pristine effect. It’s eye-watering stuff. Even worse, she calls her household appliances and implements by pet names. The book was left, rather pointedly, on my bedside table. I felt exhausted just reading it. Daughter Dear offered to buy me a ‘sonic scrubber’ for my grouting. I politely declined.

Returning to my little grey home in the north west to a chilly miasma of dust, gloom and an unmade-up bed, I considered briefly sleeping in the ‘good’ spare room, but unfortunately, it’s become an emergency repository for anything lying about when the doorbell rings. Excavating my way through was too daunting. The other spare bed was covered in undelivered Christmas gifts. Nothing for it then but to tackle the king size problem if I was to get a night’s sleep.

I’m a person of small stature, short arms and rapid fatigue. When did beds get so big? And why was the invention of the duvet greeted with such glee? Bed making was always a terrible faff. As a child, I slept in a founderingly cold attic in a standard double, its sheets firmly anchored with hospital corners and the weight of Witney wool blankets so savagely tucked in, it was like trying to get into an envelope. On top, a candlewick bedspread and a slidey satin eiderdown which spent the night migrating southwards. Climbing in, you were greeted by the clammy kiss of icy sheets, your feet searching for the tiny patch of warmth created by a hot water bottle and your nose frozen in the morning when you woke to frost flowers on the windowpane.

However, when you marry a six-footer, you need a king size bed. Duvets had become the whole go by then. It was a doddle getting the covers on when there were two pairs of hands. Alone, it’s a wrestling match, the best of three falls and the winner – the duvet cover.

Auntie Mollie set her face against modernity. She couldn’t be doing with “one of them doovey things” and insisted on blankets, a bolster and feather pillows. Is there anybody under fifty who knows what a bolster is? A long cylindrical pillow the width of the bed. You threw half of it over one shoulder like a sailor’s kitbag and fed it into a long pillowcase like a sausage into its skin. Jumping up and down and shaking it violently helped. It was, ironically, perfect practice for the impossible task of getting a king size duvet into its cover – a task that comes round with monotonous regularity due to my habit of falling asleep sitting up in bed with a cup of coffee balanced on my chest. Please don’t write in with helpful tips. I’ve tried them all – and some original methods of my own devising, including gathering the duvet in my arms and crawling up the bed inside the cover. To me, the term ‘duvet day’ does not spark joy.

If a king size cover dry is ordeal enough, a king size cover wet is lethal. I stagger to the garage with a bale of sodden fabric. The battle begins to disentangle it and heave it up onto the old wooden pulley line, tugging and smoothing as I go. Iron? Chance would be a fine thing…. To the hot press for a fresh one and the ghastly cycle begins again. It’s creased – but it’s clean. What more do you want?