When did the words ‘thread count’ come into our collective consciousness? Certainly for the greater part of my life I, and I suggest many, had no idea such a thing existed, but now even the bed-linen department of John Lewis – a spot I regard as far from recherché and elitist – mentions thread count as an inducement to buy one set of sheets over another. Hotels which never used to inform their prospective guests of such a thing offer their bedlinen’s thread count as a temptation to stay, along with claw-foot baths and luxury bath products.
In my list of must-knows, thread counts come high in the category of needless information, but then for many, the whole business of the making of beds has become, like so much of our lifestyle-obsessed culture, an achievement in itself. And perhaps that’s as it should be. Beds are important. Very important.
The first moment of getting into bed is usually the best. Giving in to the bed, letting it take our weight, submitting to the embrace of the bedclothes and allowing our heads to be supported by the pillows is a real treat. It’s worth savouring that moment, since the pleasing sensation of being in bed decreases with the hours spent there, and generally by the time of getting up, familiarity with that state has numbed the pleasure. Unless you are a teenager, at which point, you appear to be almost physically rooted to the bed until well into the afternoon.
But that’s if bed is considered only a place to rest. What if bed is instead a deeply comforting base for the day’s activities? What if bed is just as effective a place to work as a desk?
It’s taken me a lifetime to give in to the idea that bed is an acceptable place to spend time. I’m naturally a kind of wake-up, get-up girl. I live with a man whose mantra is ‘Rest is your friend’ and who can happily spend hours, if not days, taking up what he calls ‘the prone position’ in tribute to P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. He may or may not be asleep, but he feels none of the sense of concern I had until recently, that being in bed is a waste of my time.
It was a photograph on Instagram of Lady Diana Cooper’s bedroom that helped crystallise a new attitude to bed. Diana Cooper, after all, was the model for Lady Leone in Nancy Mitford’s novel Don’t Tell Alfred, the tiresome but charismatic wife of the outgoing British ambassador in Paris who refused to leave her bed in the British residence when the new ambassador and his wife arrived. Bed was a big thing for her.
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Lady Diana’s bed itself (a small double) was not the story. What was so attractive was the equipment she had around her to keep herself amused and, to some extent, allow her to get on with things. On one side was a three-tiered table piled with a rattan basket of paperwork, including correspondence to be dealt with, along with a portable radio. Crucially, a waste-paper bin was also bedside – no effective and delightful bed life should have old bits of paper and tissues lying on the floor around it.
Settled on her palest pink pillows was a bone-shaped neck bolster – fashionable at that time to make reading in bed more comfortable. On the bed were a white telephone and a pile of books. A vase of daffodils and a red amaryllis plant sat beside, on a small table. This was a bedroom I could do business with. A bedroom where things could be achieved while lolling in splendour. For me, it was one of those inspiring life moments. Cue numerous hours spent online and in antique markets trying to find a similar three-tiered table, delicate but substantial and at the correct height for a reading light.
Despite this revelation, I have not been completely able to submit to bed, although frequently, about three in the afternoon, if nothing is happening and I have nowhere to be, I will take myself off for a little lie-down. This is obviously something that can be undertaken only if one’s work is not tied to office hours and there are no children to care for. A little lie-down is meant to involve a restorative snooze but invariably doesn’t, since once in bed, the desire to conk out fades and instead it’s possible to read, listen to the radio, scroll Instagram and simply indulge in the delight of being there.
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Once bed is embraced as a place where things other than sleep and sometimes sex happen, the next issue becomes bed linen, a subject open to endless debate. At some point, we became a nation of duvet users, myself included, but in reality, they are a travesty compared to a bed made with blankets and sheets and even an eiderdown, the quilted cover that duvets have made redundant. Duvets reduce the time involved in bed-making, but they are an example of comfort being exchanged for practicality. And in a note to all suffering from hot flushes and night sweats: ditch the duvet. Make the bed with lightweight sheets and an old-fashioned open weave, technically called cellular, blanket. Layering is not just for clothes. It makes a lot of sense for bedlinen.
Back in the early 1990s, Chrissie Rucker, who founded The White Company, was working as an assistant to the beauty editor on Harpers & Queen magazine. My brother Jason was also working there, as a more senior member of the art department. One day, Chrissie came to him and said she had this idea for starting a company that only sold white bed linen. What did he think? He replied that it was ridiculous, an absurd idea, and she should stick to the day job.
And we all know how that ended, because Chrissie has been one of the most successful female founders in the country, with The White Company now selling so much more than just than bed linen – scented candles, towels, slippers, even clothing. The White Company is a whole well-designed and affordable world. Like so many of the best ideas, its strength lay in simplicity and timing. Chrissie was early to realise that, along with our attitude to food, which has improved beyond recognition in the last 60 years, the contents of our homes have come into much sharper focus. With The White Company, she identified an opportunity to cater for this in a very targeted but affordable way.
Back in the 1960s, Terence Conran was arguably the man who brought domestic decoration to the forefront of our lives with his early chicken-brick and scrubbed-pine aesthetic, and it’s not that interior decoration in terms of furniture, wallpaper and lighting was not previously valued. But by the 1990s, another generation, in particular of women, was freed from the notion that it might in some way belittle them to be interested in such household ephemera as tablecloths and bed linen. Some regarded this as a post-feminist world where it was no longer necessary to fight for equal rights by being militantly against the burden of traditional female housewifery and there was endless debate along the lines of ‘Is feminism dead?’ or ‘Do we still need feminism?’
Chrissie, with her gung-ho entrepreneurial attitude, exemplified the person she wanted to sell to. A woman who could build a huge company, but still was interested in the stuff of the home. She was far ahead of the current contemporary curve, embracing elaborate table-scaping, sofa-scaping, bed-scaping (for heaven’s sake) and the trad wife movement, but she was in the forefront of the new interest in the accoutrements of domesticity – a growing excitement over tablecloths and napkins, candlesticks, cushions and, yes, bed linen.
As it happens, last night I didn’t sleep at all. For hours, I tossed around plumping up the pillows, pulling sheets up and down, wondering whether to just give in and get up and do something, anything, other than fret about why I wasn’t sleeping.
For most of my life, sleep has been something that just happened. I didn’t think any more about it than I did breathing. I am now aware that birdsong starts in the park outside at exactly 3.35, at first the gentle tweets of robins and tits and then, half an hour later, dominated by the cawing of a carrion crow.
In recent years, that has changed, as it does with many people as they get older. People ask if you slept well, a question that for most of my life, no one bothered to pose. But I have become one of the legions of people who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about sleep – or lack of it. Although this is a major preoccupation, it’s also one of the most uninteresting discussions available. How many times did we wake? Was it 1am or possibly 2am – hard to remember. ‘It’s a nightmare, isn’t it, when you wake at 5.30 and there’s not really enough time to go back to sleep?’
Our expectations of sleep have changed hugely over the years and the idea that we need a good eight hours of continual shut-eye is a tyranny that only makes those who don’t manage this utopian ideal worry more. Far more reasonable would be a return to the biophasic sleep pattern, or first and second sleeps, a common practice from around the 16th to 19th centuries unearthed, in the late 20th by historian Roger Ekirch. Before the introduction of electric light and the more widespread uniform hours of a working day brought in by the Industrial Revolution, our sleeping practices were different. Many of us would sleep for about three hours in the earlier part of the night, wake for a couple of hours to get up and socialise, perhaps pray, sometimes eat, sometimes have sex or even do some work, and then return for the second sleep of another three hours.
An acceptance of such behaviour would suit me perfectly. Perhaps with the new emphasis on a hybrid work culture and even with the changes in working practice that AI will surely bring, biophasic sleep might make a comeback as the norm for many. And with it, an ever greater appreciation of the pleasures of bed.
This is an extract from Black Coffee and Red Lipstick: Notes on Living by Alexandra Shulman (£20, Mitchell Beazley)
