Where am I?

Waking up this morning in the reprocessed place that is now the BEDroom I feel somewhat confused.

(Although not as confused as the guy I used to work with who occasionally woke up and wondered "who am I?")

The room seems like one of Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen’s wet dreams, only one where he’s ejaculated too soon. A tiny little space almost pointlessly reworked and yet unfinished. Whilst the old bedroom has its fairly tasteless pine built-in wardrobes and tatty ancient sub-ikea blinds it did at least have the nice red walls we painted last summer and the huge, deep wood coloured chest we removed from Beck’s parent’s garage not too long ago.

The new BEDroom has the hybrid-dimensions of a cheap hotel and one of those pods in Toyko which were popular in the nineties. Sleep chambers I think they were called. Stacked up on top of each other like a drunk Star Trek episode the occupant couldn’t even sit upright inside, yet had a mini-bar, a music system and little cinema.

The walls are the same colour as every other room, bar the bedroom, a sort of off-dirty magnolia, but with absolutely nothing on them they seem dirtier. Almost offensively blandness.

Strangely the bed feels lower than it did in the other room.

At the end of the bed is a set of book shelves tucked into the recess formed by the old fireplace. Adjacent to that the plastic kids furniture chest of drawers atop which sits a montage of stills from one of Beck’s videos. A welcome flash of colour.

On the floor, leaning against the wall, is the tall mirror I liberated from my parents. It should be hung on the wall but the cheap plaster means that anything bigger than the tiniest of nails sends hairline cracks sprinting across the walls. So it’s propped up, like it’s sleepy.

I roll over and half the globe comes into eyesight. Our old guide books have relocated to one of the shelves in the recess by our heads. Paris. Venice. Sicily. The Languedoc. The USA. A 1999 European Rail Summer Timetable. Above that clothes are stuffed into the gaps between the MDF.

I get out of bed, bang my knee on the wall and then stub my toe on the weights I haven’t properly put under the bed.

“Nnngghh.”

I’ll get used to it. The bedroom in Whatman Road was pretty small and there wasn’t much room between my side of the bed and the wall then. Although, as the table that used to sit there is now adjacent to my new desk location, I know that the gap was forty-three centimetres.

The gap here at it’s widest is thirty-four centimetres. At its narrowest, nine point five.

Better hurry up and loose some mass.