Sleeping around

Since we began our long holiday in the UK, we’ve slept in eleven different beds, by my last calculation. That’s including the week we spent with my daughter and her family because the tenants who’d taken over our house wanted it a week early. Those were single beds, but we’ve been fortunate to have been able to sleep in double beds ever since, with one exception. This was at the Youth Hostel in Gillingham, when we had bunk beds. I had to sleep on top, of course, and of course had to get up in the night to go to the loo. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to get down from an upper bunk bed in the middle of the night, in the dark, and doing it quietly so as not to wake the other person in the room, nor the people in the rooms next door, who, because the walls were so paper-thin, would have easily heard me.

It’s a bit like trying to play pianissimo when your instrument is a tuba, or a serpentine bassoon, or an aquaggaswack. The latter is listed on an odd site called OddMusic.com and is described as 29 hanging pot lids, a gong tree with a wide sonic palette. Don't ask me how to pronounce it.