My favourite woollen mill is hiring.

The straw that broke the camel’s back of getting Catherine and I together was that Catherine offered my grandmother the use of her bed.

Nana was in town for the occasion of my little brothers’ 19th birthdays, 30 years ago next month. She brought her mandolin. She was staying the weekend. She needed a place to sleep. I was living in an attic hovel in the house next door to Catherine at the time, accessed by a ladder, and was in no position to offer her my bed.

I may be only realizing tonight that Catherine set up the entire pageant: offer Nana her bed, then, once the night had worn on, ask if I’d like to kiss her, and then, oh, look, she had no place to sleep.

She anticipated my chivalry. Up the ladder she climbed

I was so pleasantly naive.

Despite the conniving build-up, it was a chaste coupling that night, in part because the conditions in the attic hovel caused Catherine to have an severe allergic reaction, in part because I was shy. Or chivalrous. Or chivalrous and shy.

But, from that night onward, we were seldom apart in the overnight hours, relocating from the hovel to Catherine’s considerably more comfortable, accessible, and hypoallergenic bedroom next door. The chastening lessened.

We slept on futons during the early years; it wasn’t until we relocated to Prince Edward Island, and my selfsame grandmother was coming to visit, that we secured, at her insistence, an actual bed. It’s the bed that, 25 years later, Olivia is sleeping on tonight. It’s the bed Olivia was conceived on, New Years Eve 1999.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2014, Catherine moved from the bed we’d shared for many years into the bed in the spare bedroom: her sleep was fitful, she was often in pain, she’d started to use a CPAP machine, and the last thing either of us needed was our moving about the bed to wake up the other.

I don’t think we ever admitted honestly how much an effect that move had on our relationship. We are the generation that grew up with Rob and Laura Petrie sleeping in separate beds on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and evolved to Bob and Emily Hartley sleeping in the same bed on The Bob Newhart Show. Sleeping in the same bed was our cultural birthright, willed to us by the sexual revolution, and not doing so seemed like the end of something vital.

And it was.

But sleeping in my own bed is what kept me going, all the years Catherine was in bed across the hall: being able to get a good night’s sleep, every night, and, almost as important, being able to shut the bedroom door, every night, and create a (thin) airlock between me and the roiling, gave me just enough rest and peace to keep me going.

Across the hall, Catherine could gather herself in her infinite palace of pillows, sleep when she could sleep, get up when she needed, and have no worry that she’d keep me awake.

It’s strange how, even having lived the benefits of having my own bed through those years, it still seems divergent when I hear of other couples who sleep apart. “I wonder what’s wrong?!”, I silently whisper to myself, assuming there must be trouble in their coupling. Sleeping in the same bed has become a semaphore for relationship health. And that is a shame, as I think it’s possible to have a perfectly healthy, deep, and committed loving relationship with someone, and still maintain two beds. Indeed I think for many, cancer or not, it may be preferred by one or the other or both.

I wrote to a friend the other day that I wasn’t looking to get “redomesticated” as my life evolves into its next chapters. It was a blunt way of expressing that there are a bunch of habits and practices that I lived inside for almost 30 years, some of them active expressions of patriarchy, some of them simply generally accepted relationship principles, that I’m reluctant to swallow whole again.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’m moving into the Burning Man phase of my life, simply that I’m better positioned to recognize and do what’s actually healthy for both parties to a couple, and not just what’s expected by others, or intuited from inherited semaphores.

Which is all to say that should I, at some point, enter into a less chaste friendship with someone, it will take a lot to separate me from the pleasures of retiring for the night to a bed all my own.

You also can’t name it Pete. Or Brighteyes. Or Pickle. Those names are taken.

To find out what unique horse names are available, use the British Horse Racing Horse Name Availability Tool

Rhik Samadder tried horseback riding, and wrote about it in The Guardian:

I tell the brown-and-white beast to walk, and miraculously, it does. I’m riding! A horse! It’s more comfortable than I’d imagined. Bumble has a broad back, a slow wave of a gait. I hadn’t anticipated this, the easy rise and fall, the sleepy smell of sweaty flank. It should be alarming to be up this high, but it’s weirdly calming. Does being lifted from ground level elevate your attention, to a stratum where larger thoughts reside? I smell clean air. I whisper into Bumble’s fluffy forelock: “I don’t know if I want children.”

This paragraph represents a correction from the original:

A feature on horseriding evoked an improbable scene when it referred to the rider whispering into a “fluffy fetlock” (‘I pretend I am in control. I feel like the Marlboro man’, 13 September, G2, page 2). A fetlock is part of a horse’s leg, and therefore not near its ears.

Samadder has discovered, as I have, that horseworld involves learning an entirely new vocabulary. And sometimes you get it wrong.

Ride on, kindred spirit!

Craigie Hill is a track from Karine Polwart, from her upcoming album Still As Your Sleeping. I’ve listened to it about 100 times today.

When you run out of things to sketch¹, sketch your pencil.

1. I haven’t run out of things to sketch.

Taylor Swift’s Tim McGraw, released in 2006, a solid country song, has new life breathed into it by Maggie Rogers’ 2018 cover, which makes it something else entirely.

We bought this Kenmore clothes dryer at Sears twenty-one years ago:

The dryer served us well, but for the last year it’s had the unfortunate new feature of occasionally ripping holes in our clothes, and sometimes setting them on fire. 

Not “on fire” in the sense that flames were involved—I don’t think—but rather rendering them lightly singed.  

All of this was caused by a drum no longer aligned properly with the body, leaving a gap into which clothes could get caught, and then spun around with much friction. 

It is a testament to my ability to procrastinate, and my dislike of the appliance purchasing and delivery experience, that I was willing to have my clothes torn to shreds and set alight to avoid fixing the problem. 

But I finally overcame that: Olivia and I popped in to M&M Furniture in East Royalty on Saturday morning, talked to the friendly and helpful Helen Tran, and picked out a sleek, modern LG DLE3600W. Total time to purchase: 15 minutes. Consumer Reports was not involved, meaning my father is turning over in his grave (and perhaps that I will live to regret my haste).

The new dryer arrived today, and was hefted into place, and installed, by a capable crew of two, who also carted away the fire-dryer.

I’ve dried two loads of laundry in the new dryer so far, and none of my clothes have caught fire. Which you think would be a kind of baseline for a clothes dryer, but still seems amazing to me in light of recent practice.

It being 2021, the new dryer is, of course, also wifi-connected, meaning that I can, from my phone, stop it, start it, and tell how much time is left until the clothes are dry, from anywhere in the world!

I am unclear as to how this is an improvement over the previous “the clothes are dry when the dryer stops” method, but I’m game to experiment. In theory I can also say “Alexa, dry the clothes,” but I haven’t got that set up yet.

Diver William Walker saved Winchester Cathedral:

From 1906, Walker laboured under water below the Cathedral for six hours a day at depths up to 6 metres (20 ft). He worked in total darkness, using his bare hands to feel his way through the cloudy, muddy water.

His huge, heavy diving suit took a long time to put on. So when he stopped for lunch, he’d just take off his helmet. He also sometimes smoked his pipe, which he thought would kill off any germs.

(via the aforementioned Geoff Manaugh)