We usually start off in life from a bed or if not a bed, something soft. Not many mothers would give birth to a baby on top of rocks or on a push bike. When the birth pain arrives and the waters break, a comfortable soft and safe place is what most would prefer. This is where you all started. That tabernacle of life. Of course, about nine months earlier there would have been some kind of mating going on, hopefully consensual and perhaps even loving. The glorious pleasure of two becoming one, limbs entwined with a joining that seems to be what most of us will also seek, once we have left the birthing bed, and grown up as well. Perhaps also a few of us might well be a result of illicit love affairs conducted with passion on the finery of satin sheets with Lilies of the Valley carefully embroidered. Perhaps blue irises on down pillows featured beneath the thighs of a voluptuous woman giving into complete rapture to her ardent lover…?

Perhaps, doing the rounds amongst those Vinnie’s fashion items from the past, we re-discover those sweet scents, those delicate fragrances of bygone years of the many souls of evaporated lovers. It’s all so long ago now. How did we fare since leaving the bed of our birth mothers, having to make our own? Do we still carry around and live off the love of rose petals strewn around so abundantly and carefree at our beginning?

Can anyone understand people buying new beds, beds to which no memories or cares are attached? I made our own bed from Oregon pine more than fifty years ago. It is still as good now as it was then and travelled with us between continents and cities many times. Our bed as would many of those belonging to others withstood the storms of tempestuous oceans as well as the joys of soothing, weaving grassy meadows strewn with buttercups.

It seems such an awful telling sign of those discarded beds that are now featuring at many a shopping centre car-park. People must, perhaps at the dead of the night, get up and lash the hated mattress on to the top of their Holden Ute, dump their beds. There are clear signs at those charity collection bins not to leave bedding. Yet, it seems the temptation to get rid of beds overcomes the warnings, and the soiled and stained remnants of bedding and dead loves are left there. At any given time there must be those, so utterly disappointed in what those beds produced, they feel the urgent need to jettison those hated items of joyless nights and loathsome sad embraces. They drive, looking for the graveyards of hopeless loves and hateful congress but end up in the grey concrete of Westfield’s car-park or the Vinnie’s bin in front of Woolies.

Is it not so true that we deserve the beds that we lie in?