Make sure your bed is comfortable before you lie in it

Date Published: {J}

It may have escaped your notice, but March has been designated as National Bed Month in Britain – presumably by the people who make and sell beds.

But ‘research’ carried out by Ikea has discovered that Britons spend more time choosing what to eat for their lunch than what kind of mattress they will spend the best years of their life sleeping on.

Frankly that surprised me too, because while I clearly spend some time considering what tasty morsels can sate my lunchtime hunger, I too place a huge importance on sleep.

Back in the day when I bought my first house and was the proud recipient of the £2,000 first time house buyer’s grant – the only money I had for furniture – I had to prioritise by domestic appliances.

I had to have a cooker and a fridge, a cheap table and chair and a wardrobe – but the one thing I didn’t want to scrimp on was a mattress.

When I told the furniture store man all of this – and emphasised the point by joking that some of my happiest times were spent in bed (meaning asleep, to be honest), he replied mockingly: “Modest, aren’t we.”

It’s not just about mattresses, of course – you first of all have to have a bed. And while you would sleep anywhere in your youth – the floor, a shelf, a car, under a tree or on one particularly shameful occasion, in the old handball alley at UCG – there comes a time in life when nothing less than home comforts is enough.

There was a recent occasion – New Year’s Eve as it turns out – when a major gathering of in-laws was muted. The problem was that, while the host is a most generous man who always appears to have done a deal with a local brewery so that supplies never run out, the sleeping arrangements involved either a blow-up mattress or a collection of cushions from the settee.

Blow-up mattresses work if you’re a small child or a six stone jockey – and I’m neither – and cushions tend to part like the Red Sea minutes after you manage to arrange them. Thus New Year’s Eve was spent home alone, but happy in my own bed.

Because the truth is that I cannot function without sleep and having endured lumpy mattresses in dodgy cheap hotels to appreciate the value of a good one.

And yet we spend so little time picking the place where everything happens – Ikea’s survey discovered that nearly three quarters (72 per cent) take under ten minutes and 37 per cent take less than five minutes to choose the mattress they are likely to sleep on for the next eight years.

According to the research, that’s the same amount of time people take choosing their lunch each day.

Is it any wonder then that 70 per cent of Brits don’t believe they are getting enough sleep – and that 52 per cent think a bad mattress could be to blame? Although one-third of the women blame their partner’s hogging of the duvet for disturbed sleep. Yeah, right.

The main reason behind these hasty purchases appears be the great British reserve, which research shows, is alive and well as nearly a third (31 per cent) of those surveyed admitted to feeling shy and embarrassed when testing a mattress.

A further 26 per cent admitted that they would be too embarrassed to even lie down on a mattress in-store before purchasing it.

And that’s commendable, because there are few worse sights in life than, when you go into a home store, to find a giggling couple rolling around on a mattress that might actually have been yours if they hadn’t ruining it with their public cavorting.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.