My Bedside Cabinets Bare All!

While usually a reluctant meme artist, blogmate Rol Hirst has inspired me to follow his lead by photographing my bedroom cabinets and talking about them.

As you will see they are mismatched owing to buying them at different times from my local old furniture emporium, which specialises in buying up secondhand furniture and fixing it up for re-sale with a lick of paint and the occasional new knob. I think the black one was about £35 and the pink one £25. I keep meaning to paint the pink one black to match better, but I never get round to it and idiosyncracy (apathy?) has now set firmly in. Moreover, being limited to the narrowest cabinets I could find owing to the compact nature of my bedroom, I never could find a matching pair and was getting tired of spilling glasses of water over the carpet when getting in and out of bed while I waited.

The black cabinet is graced by one of B&Q's classier early 90s lamps, inherited from my former fiancé, and one of my first adult possessions worth over £5, a notebook to scribble in lest I wake inspired in the night (blank, as you observe!) and most of my current reading material at various stages of digestion (self-discipline has never been a strong point!) including the delightful Edwardian comic novel 'Eliza' featuring a pompous middle-class clerk and his long-suffering wife who is only ever seen through his misconstrued impressions of her and which has been causing me to laugh out loud on buses securing a seat to myself lately, plus a blue box of tissues - the room was originally intended to have a 'seaside chalet' feel and I still automatically feel drawn to blue objects, despite having veered off the original theme somewhat, except for my pebble coasters.

Which brings me to the gloriously garish blue LCD clock/radio on the pink bedside table - so bright I usually have to put it under the bed to sleep, but wonderfully cheering on dark stormy nights when the wind howls. Hideous alarm siren and crackly radio, but in lieu of the multi-coloured numeral radio/alarm I really wanted at three times the price, I've learned to love it!

A glass of water is a must as I unfailingly wake up thirsty in the night. A cheap wood lamp (Wilkinsons' best!) originally for the guest room in my last abode but was damned if I was going to leave it behind for the benefit of my not-very-nice-former-housemate also graces the table, along with multi-vitamins for my wild self-constructive tendencies and some photos I took recently of Oxford by night, which am still debating whether to post, complete the ensemble of what my well-dressed cabinets are wearing this Winter.

Finally you can't have failed to notice the black and white 'mink' blanket which I throw over the duvet in Winter. Their designs are never subtle, but I adore these heavenly supersoft blankets, unconscionably cruel as it is that six Acrylics must die in the manufacture of each one.

For sheer writerly decadence it's hard to beat typing in bed, laptop on knee, underblanket on and propped up in the middle on all four pillows. Well the next best thing to a full-time relationship that is, when obviously you are both to be found typing blog postings at your laptops next to each other…

I won't be swine enough to tag anyone else to a parallel posting, but please don't be shy to share your intimate bedroom cabinet secrets, my brethren blogoholics!