Living in A Box

Readers, I will share a sad fact: I am thirty-three and I sleep in a bunk bed.

There is nothing sinister about this. It has nothing to do with an acreage of psychological baggage. I am not ‘eccentric’ or in the army. I never suffered an incident as a child that left me with  a crippling carpeting phobia.

No, it just so happens that the room I rent has a bunk bed in it, because that’s the only bed that fits.  This, as opposed to a real, grown up normal, thirty-three year old woman’s bed; whatever that may or may not resemble.  But if urban hearsay is to be believed; tasteful scatter cushions, a variety of modern sex toys, maybe a Twilight novel or two.

Of course, at my age, I should be swanning round a gaff of my own by now, dragging my significant other to Ikea every first Saturday of the month to deeply ponder shower curtains and sideboards. A, from whom I rent my room and it’s associated bunk bed, not only owns this flat in the Alps, but also owns a house. In Peterborough, granted, but a real-life house nonetheless. 

My baby sister has a house of her own and it has a SPARE room.  The only thing spare in my room is, well,  the bottom bunk.

I woke up in my bunk this morning (I take the top one, if you’re interested) and thought, as I lay there staring at the wardrobe with one stiff door: ‘Thank God I’m not - as mother would have it -  “courting”.’

Can you imagine? You bring a gentleman caller back to your flat, offer him a tipple, perhaps put on something inoffensively seductive.  And by this I mean Ray La Montagne or something by Iron and Wine, not in the sense of disappearing into the bedroom and coming back out in a negligee and fluffy mules with a Rothmans smouldering gently in a 1920’s cigarette holder. 

And as the music plays, imagine leading your gentleman caller into the bedroom and coyly whispering in his ear – ‘right then, top or bottom? Oh, and mind your shin on the ladder there.’

If were going to get technical about things, there’s not even enough room to do the deed on the floor, unless you want to end up disengaging your partner from the waste-paper bin or rushing him off to casualty so he can be cut out of the angle-poise lamp flex.  Truth is, the only kind of romantic act you can execute in my room is a stand-up hug.  In fact, in order to get any other one person in my room - naked or otherwise -  it’s spatially essential to hug them.

Surprisingly and fortunately enough, I have a boyfriend whom as luck would have it, I wooed when I had a bed meant for a grown-up. 

Ok, so I was also sharing a room with two other people, the wiring of which was so sketchy everything fused if you tried to boil the kettle with the lights on. But the gods smiled upon our union and, faulty wiring notwithstanding, our amour became established before I ended up in a bed meant for eight year-old siblings.

He thinks it’s amusing that I live in a room that would give an obsessive potholer claustrophobia but is a little miffed that ’sleeping over’ means nothing more promising than kipping on the sofa or taking twenty five minutes to inflate the Argos guest mattress for the living room floor.

As it happens, he sleeps in a bunk-bed as well. This isn’t a freaky ‘us’ thing by the way. Most seasonnaire rental places opt for bunks because they are used to catering to the accommodation needs of the traditional seasonnaire, ie: seventeen year olds who are so busy going out  roistering themselves silly on Jagermeister that they  end up passing out on the doorstep, thus rendering beds an irrelevance.

And besides, he sleeps in a  bunk and he’s thirty five.