Between 1 January and 1 October this year I slept in at least 19 different beds. It was not, I hasten to add, a case of being, as Hamlet put it, ‘In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed/Stew’d in corruption’—my wife occupied the other side of every one of them. Not bed hopping, just bed lobbing.
This multi-mattress story came about because, like the Bedouin of story and legend, we have never been still in 2004. Travel is, of course, highly instructive. But enlightenment comes from many sources when you journey to different lands and other cultures: from architecture , bazaars and marketplaces; from chance encounters, new friendships; from butchers and cabbies and barmen in small dusty villages; and, we gradually realised, from the serial occupancy of beds …
When you ask for a double room in Italy, you are offered, with a sort of presumptuous prudery, a matrimoniale. In a posh hotel this might resolve itself into a familiar Queen or King-sized double bed, but in most establishments a matrimoniale is two three-quarter beds pushed together to make a very generous double. Since there is no sheet large enough to cover such an area, each of the two components of the matrimoniale is individually swathed, with the result that a daunting plain of white linen is divided by a fault line where the beds meet in a vain attempt to pretend that they are not separate. Normal nocturnal restlessness often results in this crevice widening to consume an inadvertent leg or arm. Like quicksand, these gaps react to struggle and resistance by swallowing foreign bodies ever more enthusiastically.
The broad, creviced bed is not solely an Italian phenomenon. It’s just that Italian nomenclature gives it a moral flick that other nationalities don’t bother about. In rural Bavaria, for example, my carefully rehearsed ‘Haben sie eine dopple zimmer fur ein nacht, bitte?’, not only produced the deflating, Oxford-accented English reply, ‘Yairs, I fancy we can help you there’, but also failed to trigger any interest whatsoever in our marital status. Nothing different about the bed, though: it was familiarly broad and cracked down the middle.
Forced by an emergency to hire what the French call a gite (a shack to us) in a charming Provençal village called Joucas, we discovered with great joy a standard, unbifurcated double bed. Unfortunately, however, it almost filled the room from wall to wall and front to