Worth more than two birds

Last week marked the final week in the generic (although definitely a step up from the Burgmann Colleges of this world) accommodation at the University's temporary summer honeymoon getaway residence. I had the pleasure of a twin room, and Di arrived only after I moved out. That meant that I was able to sleep in one of the beds and make forts, on a miniature scale to Fort Whoop-Up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Whoop-Up

complete with a whisky store, at which I was the major customer, and a saloon in which I put my spurs up on the nearest stool and told the barkeep of the trouble brewin' down in Medicine Hat. Anyway, we are now in our new place, which has more character than an Agatha Christie novel.

I bought a bed, although that was after much umming and ahhing in the Lethbridge IKEA equivalent, known by the partially unpronounceable name 'JYSK'. I had gone a good portion of my life without knowing what a 'box spring was' - apparently it is the poor man's bed frame. So I bought a bed frame, and a matress - with a future cricket captain on the way there was no need to skimp on the matress... and, in a deer-in-the-headlights daze, I asked the attendant what the story was re the box spring. She said that it was not essential... but 'added some height'. BANG! Height adding is what I'm all about, so I had no hesitation in buying it. She was a little puzzled at my trio of purchases, but was good enough to sell them to me nonetheless.

I pieced together the bed, whence the title for this post. There was a classic set of 'non-language-specific' instructions, which brought all of us together as citizens of the world. This was the first page.

Note, not just the prison-cell depiction of the placing of one's bed, but that one bird had been crossed out, leaving two. I figured that, in the bed composition department (if nothing else) I was as good, if not better than two birds, particularly ones whose heads and legs were not attached, which must lead to very compromising times in the allen-key rotational stakes, that is, if they can get the time off from moonlighting as toilet posers. Oh yes, and there is a hammer there. I had no hammer. I did, however, have the recent purchase of two 1kg cans of tomatoes to 'watch my back'. These helped in the hammering, with some judicious rotations to avoid the expectoration of tomato juice over the bed frame.

(Recently, I thought it a wise move to reaquaint myself with one of my childhood heroes, Sherlock Holmes. I tell you now, the second time round is a bit of a let down. Perhaps people were more easily fooled in the 1890s, or in their pre-teen book reading days, when the only other serious competitor was R.L.Stine, of the 60 chapters, each two pages, gambit. The climactic ending of one of the novellas hinged on Holmes' constructing a dummy which 'looked just like him', and thereby delaying the miscreants sufficiently long to gleam his incriminating information. Oh yes, and there is lots of air-time to the word 'ejaculated', in the classical sense meaning 'thrown out'. Thus, Watson will, periodically, interject ('throw between', sure) with 'But surely Holmes, you cannot be serious?!' with the customary third-person two-step of ', I ejaculated'. That seems to have lost its way in the modern world. It would be a brave man who brought that one back. I'm trying to bring back flat caps to Canada,


but the reintroducing of 'ejactulated' into family-friendly conversational currency, is out of my league.)

Anyway, the final product of the bed was an Everestian behemouth.


I had to perform a little run-up and primary-school-high-jump-scissors-kick to even gain access to this Procrustean bed, but, fortunately, my feet didn't ram up agains the footboard. On her first night in the house, I had to provide Di with the two-step step-ladder (and some tanks of oxygen) to aid her ascent.

I'm not sure whether the inimitable JYSKians are keen on their refunds, but this is an exercise for the forthcoming week.