Telling bedtime stories

Thirteen years ago, when I was nearly 22, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I bought our first flat together. After our university years of living in rented accommodation we didn't really have many pieces of essential furniture: such as a bed, a sofa, a dining table or a bookshelf. So in the week before we were due to move in to our new flat it dawned upon me that I needed to furnish an entire flat on a very limited budget, very quickly (this may seem a lackadaisical approach, but I consider myself to be quick off the mark here as this thought wouldn't have dawned on my husband until it was time to go to bed on our first night in the new flat). Wandering down Upper Street in Islington I came across an ancient creaky iron bedstead. It had carved flowers at the joints and it was love at first sight. I was only more delighted when the shop owner said that he had a mattress down the side of the shop that I could have with it and it looked in far better condition than anything I'd ever slept on in our rented accommodation, so I eagerly arranged for him to drop them around the next week.

That bed was lovely, but decrepit. When the nighttime heavy freight trains rumbled, squealing and groaning, past our bedroom window at 4am, it would shudder backward and forward on its rusty wheels as though it were possessed (the whole flat moved a little too...unnerving, but fun). Years later, at a different house (shakier foundations, but no freight trains to make its movement felt daily), the joint that held one of the wheels collapsed and so for a time it was also a lopsided resting place. It's only now that I wonder why we didn't think to prop it up with a block of wood. It pained me to say goodbye to those lovely carved flowers, but when my husband's grandmother died, we spent his inheritance on a bed and a dining table from Habitat. Solid things made of oak that we'd keep for years.

When the bed arrived we moved it into position,delighted by the prospect of a night's sleep unpunctuated by creaking each time one of us turned over. When we hauled our own mattress onto it we were a little surprised to see that we were left with a few inches of bare wood at each side and  many inches of unmattressed bed frame at the end. Did the display bed in Habitat really have so much wood exposed, we asked one another. Neither of us could remember, but we placed large pillows between the bedhead and the top of the mattress and found that once a duvet and quilts were piled on top of the bed, you couldn't actually see the wood surplus. It took us a few months of bruised shins to remember to walk around the bed giving it plenty of clearance to avoid being jabbed by the bedframe, but other than that we were happy.

Sort of. Neither of us have ever actually slept very well. My husband's arms seem to fly around like a windmill's sails while he sleeps and several times I have been woken as I have been hit in the face by one of them and so most of the time I would end up on the edge of the bed (meanly stealing most of the covers to make up for my lack of space). It was only a year ago as we wondered why we slept so much better when we were away from home that we started also pondering the possibility of a bigger bed. And so, it was seven years after Habitat had delivered our bed to us that we made the discovery that they'd delivered the wrong bed. Rather than the double that we'd requested we had been given a king-sized bed...which explained why our mattress didn't fit. We were quite delighted to find that we were only a new mattress away from a better night's sleep, rather than an entire bed. And even though our old mattress had come to feel very much 'ours', with age and distance from our university years, I also felt increasingly disturbed that I'd been so delighted by a second-hand mattress stored in an alley next to a shop and that we were still sleeping on it thirteen years later.

Yesterday, our first ever brand new mattress was delivered. The moment the delivery men left the house the children and I wasted no time in leaping on it before we'd even put any bed linen on it. Do you know the odd thing though? Every time one of our old make-shift pieces of furniture is dispensed with to be replaced by something more proper (and more comfortable) I feel like I'm saying goodbye to a bit of our rather naive and funny younger selves and somehow ironing out the creases that might be what makes our shared household experience of being us, 'us'.  Do you ever feel like that?

Florence x