Le Lit de Mon Oncle
It is time that someone wrote a book on the evolution of the bed, that indispensable adjunct to humanity's more splendid if slightly vulgar celebrations, birth, love and death. Not that any one of this trinity has, at the moment, aroused in me an interest in beds, but rather travel, that traditional broadener of the mind, and on this occasion bruiser of the hips. Beds themselves, all with four legs and differing only in size, are not, perhaps, particularly intriguing, but the making up of them, varying as it does so widely in each country, is surely a field for research. Why, for instance, in Austria, are the mattresses made in three portions, the fitting together of which leaves two ridges of high pressure, cone beneath the ribs and one the knees ? Why, in Switzerland, which is a cold country, are the top sheet and blankets turned back at the bottom end so that the feet of the unwary are immediately exposed to the outer air the moment he gets into bed ? Why do the French invariably hide their pillows in the armoire, and who, in this country, was influential in spreading the pathetic belief that a silk-covered eiderdown is adhesive ? Bedded in folk lore the answers are, presumably, to be found.
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