In Bed With Joanna Walsh

This is the bed I slept in last night, in a hotel I was booked into by a litfest. I sleep in a lot of beds like this at litfests, in golf hotels on the edge of town. There are often weddings taking place in these hotels and I’m sometimes tempted to forget my event and crash them, but I’m usually not dressed right.

It is a double bed. I always sleep in one side, tho I don’t have a consistent side. In the middle of hotel beds there is often a ridge, which means the bed can be unzipped into two beds. When I got to this hotel the first thing I did was to get into bed. I had high hopes, as hotel beds are often comfortable. But this hotel bed didn’t smell great: as tho someone might have made chips often in a nearby room. The room was also odd, arranged so that the bed area, separated from the seating area by a bathroom, had no windows. As I suffer from occasional claustrophobia, this worried me a little, but it was ok, as the bed area was relatively large.

At home I spend a lot of time in bed, working there in the winter, when it’s cold and I’m too mean to put the heating on. I also wear a wooly hat. I work in bed in the evenings frequently in all weathers. I crook my knees up to balance my laptop and my dog crawls underneath them. I’m single. When I sleep with people, I prefer to go to their beds as it’s easier to leave than to sling someone out in the morning.

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