Obsessed by the bed, I overlooked the linen, hardly surprising for as obsessions go, the bed was one of the more significant to seize me for you've got to get the bed thing right but there are many, many beds in the kingdoms of the bedmakers.

There are cheap beds which also tend to be the shaky beds. "It moves," I said to the female sales person, shaking a bed that appeared to have been assembled from sheets of cardboard.

"The boys haven't bolted it together properly," she said. "It'll be fine when you put it in your bedroom."

I shook it again and it rattled like a wooden blind in a cyclone. Realising the potential for disaster and severe physical impairment inherent in such a purchase, I left Bedrock Beds and went to Myer where I could have saved $1,000 in five minutes. To achieve this saving, however, I was required to outlay around $4,500.

"It's lovely," I said, patting the bed as one would a dog and reversing away from the extremely polite and matronly woman who was smiling at me benignly.

It had to be blokey, this bed. Queen-sized, to be precise but where is it written that large beds have to bear regal designations?

I'm comfortable with a small bed being called a single and one which can sleep two people as a double but from where did we get the kind and queen? Am I alone in feeling just a little uncomfortable with asking for and subsequently sleeping in a queen bed?

Can't we have single, double, large and extra large beds? Do kings really have bigger beds than queens? I'd be prepared to bet that Her Maj has a significantly larger cot than Prince Phillip. I'd also have a side bet that it's been a while since he got within 50 metres of it.

I would have bought a king but had serious doubts that it would have fitted in the bedroom. And what does ownership of a king bed say about a person? Would it be thought that you were trying to over-compensate for your size deficiencies in other areas?

"You have to lie on it," said the sales woman in Forty Winks in the Valley's Emporium centre. If you have ever lain on a bed and tried to assess how comfortable it is while someone watches you, then you will appreciate how uneasy this exercise can make you feel.

I bounced up and down a few times, nodded my head and made "Hmmmmmm" noises. What are you supposed to do? Produce and inflatable doll and indulge in simulated coitus in the middle of the store in order to road-test a mattress? All I wanted was a good night's sleep. A sugar bag full of rolled up newspaper would have been an improvement on the bed of nails on which I was presently attempting to steal a few moments of nightly rest.

Confused, I retreated and returned the next day, circling the mattress like a dog would a bone and then I saw my blokey, brown queen-sized bed.

   "I want that one," I said to the pleasant gentleman unfortunate to be closest to me.
   "It comes with side drawers and a lingerie cabinet," he said.
   "I live alone. I haven't got any lingerie," I said, trying not to protest too much.

What does a lack of lingerie say about a man living alone?

Should I have been flattered by the prospect of a lingerie cabinet? Or did I look like the sort of man living alone who would be likely to have his own lingerie collection. Surely not.

   "Could you put undies in it?" I asked.
   "I think so," he said.
   "Thank God," I muttered.

So I bought the bed and the price was right. I was deliriously happy, hauling sheets from the cupboard, I snapped the fitted bottom sheet over one mattress corner and then the other. Flick! The moment I tried to get the fourth corner tucked, the other three would untuck and the sheet would wrap around my head.

This, believe me, can become tiresome very quickly. If I lay spreadeagled on the bed, each foot could hold down a corner but this still left two unfitted and beyond reach.

As I lay there trying to stretch to the furthermost corner, it occurred to me that the reason the fitted sheet did not want to be fitted could be in some way related to the fact that my previous bed had been a double.

So I went to the sheet shop and spent a large amount of money on queen-sized sheets and pillow cases with a king-sized price tag and got home and realised the doonah was a double.

So I went back and bought a queen-sized doonah which was then too big for the double doonah cover so I went back and bought a queen-sized doonah cover.

In order to get the queen-sized doonah quilt into the queen-sized doonah cover, I crawled inside it in an attempt to tuck it into the corner.

Stumbling around in what felt like a large white tent, trying to tuck the quilt into a far corner of the cover, I overbalanced and slid off the end of the bed, landing on the floor where I lay thrashing about, gripped by claustrophobic panic and moaning for help.