Every time my wife Maria and I got into bed the earth moved.
I put it down to gymnastics and one too many jumps on the mattress. But let me assure you, the problem had arisen from neither geological shifts or romantic assignations, although it did need sorting.
The bed creaked and moved every time we retired as if saying: “Careful. I could collapse. And where would that leave you?”
As I have a bad back, the possibilities are ripe with embarrassment if paramedics were called to lift me clear from a collapsed cot.
“Not the top of the wardrobe again?”
“Sadly not. I have a screw loose.” Because that was the trouble.
Our granddaughter Jeannie has been in the habit, in moments when Peppa Pig had lost her television allure, of jumping up and down on our bed. She was good at it, too. At least silver medal standard. As the frame is metal, she had also taken to using it as a climbing frame before launching herself into the wide blue yonder for acrobatic free fall on to the mattress.
Her bouncing had loosened screws that held the frame together. We tightened visible and accessible ones and moved the mattress clear to inspect the damage on the underside.
Because of my aforementioned bad back, it was my wife who crawled beneath the frame.
She found the fault: one of the central legs had lost its retaining screw. I went downstairs into the garage in search of a replacement and time tends to pass when you discover other items you weren’t even looking for.
It was a trip down memory lane until I heard her shouting. Whoops. She was still prone beneath the bed. We fixed the problem: she holding a nut in place with a pair of pliers while I tightened it from up top.
The repair was complete and we know that the next time we go to bed, the earth will no longer move. Well, not in that way.
