Everything begins in bed. Days, nights, weeks, weekends, Saturdays and Sundays. And everything ends in bed too. Days, nights, weeks… It does not matter what happens during the day, what adventures or unexpected happenings may occur, all the days of our lives have a common denominator: this discrete piece of horizontal furniture to which we dedicate an entire room in our home. Bed, my bed, our bed. Beds can be places of solitude or company, the setting for exhaustion, happiness, laziness and even breakfast. Breakfast in bed. Yes. Always. There are temporary beds which accompany us on our life’s journey: bunk beds at camps and youth hostels, motel beds and beds in luxury resorts, transatlantic ocean plane seats, which sometimes have to su ce, and cars which provide overnight shelter from a storm, an incident, or whatever. But you always, always, return to the bed you have chosen, to your main bed, your home bed. Your real bed.

You may change the mattress or the pillows. You may change the sheets in winter or summer. You may choose the warm side or the cold side; you may sleep face down or face up, with the curtains open or drawn. But the bed remains. Home is where we keep our books. Home is also where our bed lives. We read a lot in bed, to then dream about what we’ve read. But we can also dream without ever opening a book, because the bed doesn’t care.

Groucho Marx wrote an entire book (a slim volume, but a book nonetheless) about beds. He called it (obviously) ‘Beds’ and filled it with memorable phrases such as ‘a thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all’, ‘I spent the sixteen happiest years of my life in bed’, and ‘in bed we’re all the same’. Happy dreams, happy choice of bed.