Changing the Bed

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I promised to tell you a story. Here it is.

A few days ago, we had to change the bed because the old one was broken. I'd managed a temporary repair (of which I was quite proud – see picture). It was good that all those DIY books I bought had come in useful at last. But the bed wasn't going to last forever like that. We had to take it apart before it fell apart.

Fortunately we had a spare bed. It was just a question of finding it. You might think that a bed's not the sort of thing you can easily lose, but in this house we manage to lose an awful lot of stuff. I'm sure there's an elephant hidden around here somewhere. And there's certainly about 126 pens - all the ones I can never find when I'm trying to take a message on the phone. And the point about this bed was that we'd taken it down and hidden it in bits. This had made it easy to store but much less easy to find now that we needed it. It might have been a good idea, in retrospect, to have stored the bits all together, but it turned out that for whatever reason, we'd decided to spread them evenly around the house, perhaps feeling that some of the rooms would feel left out if they didn't have a bit of the bed in them somewhere.

It only took us two or three hours to find all the various bits - only an hour and a half, in fact, unless you count the final part of all: the nuts and bolts that held them all together.

"They'll probably be in a bag somewhere," my wife Chris suggested. She's always happy to chip in with vital information like that. How on earth would I ever get by without her?

"We've already searched everywhere but under the sink and the boiler cupboard," I said. "The only other place it could be is..." I raised my eyes in foreboding to the ceiling. Something unseen yet enormous was hanging over us: the loft. The cluttered loft. There was an awful lot of stuff in the loft. That was probably where we'd put the elephant.

"Don't worry," I said in a trembling voice. "It probably won't be in the loft. It's probably under the sink or in the boiler cupboard." I bloody well hoped it was. I didn't fancy another few days of searching.

So I went to poke about in the boiler cupboard while Chris looked under the sink. Little did I know what I would find there.

At first, when they fluttered down from the top shelf across everything lying below, I thought that they must be wood shavings. They were light brown in colour and they were the right sort of size. And yet, they didn't feel like wood shavings. They were softer, kind of like plastic. Were they plastic shavings then? How could that have happened? Was there some kind of vermin in the cupboard perhaps? Yet what sort of rats would chew up bits of plastic? Could it be some sort of newly mutated species, which would now proceed to nibble its way across the world, chomping through the fabric of plastic which holds together our very civilisation?

Then I looked more closely at one of the pieces of plastic. There seemed to be some kind of writing on it. This was getting weirder. Had the rats left me a message or something?

But then I worked out what had happened. Of course! It was obvious. These bits of plastic were what remained of a biodegradable bag. In the heat of the cupboard, it had started to biodegrade.

It had been on the top shelf of the cupboard where the heat from the boiler was highest. That’s what must have set the process in motion. I rummaged through some of the bags we’d stored on a lower shelf (well what are you supposed to do with the bloody things?) and pulled out one the same colour: “Wilkinson” it said, and in small print at the bottom: “This bag is biodegradable”.

Just at that time, I have to admit, I didn’t really appreciate the contribution of the Wilkinson company to saving the earth. I was thinking more along the lines of “Couldn’t they have said that in bigger writing?”, more like a government health warning on a packet of cigarettes? Something like “This bag could seriously annoy you while you’re searching for bits of a bed”. Wasn’t it reasonable to expect them to have foreseen such a problem?

Then Chris shouted up from the kitchen.

“I’ve found them!”

The packet of nuts and bolts had been under the sink.

Later on, when the bed was duly assembled and I was driving the bits of the old one to the tip, I began to appreciate that Wilkinsons were really OK after all. It was good that they were doing their bit to save the planet. And it was reassuring, really, to realise that biodegradable bags really biodegraded and that the whole thing wasn’t a con. I began to feel rather encouraged. Maybe if we all pulled together, we would save the planet after all. And here was I doing my bit by taking all the bits of wood from the bed to the council tip for recycling.

But when I arrived at the tip, I couldn’t see anywhere to put the wood.

“Oh, there’s not enough skips,” said the guy I asked, who was busy leaning on a brush. “Just put the wood in with General”.

Comments

[Pat]

I like your blog. Harry recommended it.
I've always thought that biodegradable bags were a con also, so good to hear it works. Under my sink is full of plastic bags as I can't bring myself to throw them out. Maybe now I will if they will biodegrade in the landfill. On a similar note I have just changed to online billing from BT and as well as saving paper they promised to plant a sapling somewhere on my behalf to make up for the paper sent to me in the past. I'm impressed.
Good luck with the bed, DIY is a good method of getting lost in the here and now, yes?