In your Dreams

One of Bonusbarn's conversational gambits - usually when he's bored and no one has spoken for five seconds, so there's a gaping void of silence to fill - is "when can I have a new bed?"

The question is much more reasonable now than it was two years ago. He sleeps in the same high riser he's used for the last seven years. He is now long enough to fill it exactly, and when he climbs up into it, he can feel it beginning to tilt as the centre of gravity shifts. But there is a lot of storage space under it and, because you should always play hard to get when granting teenage requests, my usual reply is "show how you can fit everything in with a normal bed."

Which, irritatingly, is what he spent most of yesterday doing, rearranging his room and turning out bagfuls of rubbish. By teatime, it really would have seemed churlish to say "well, maybe at Christmas ..." So today we ventured out to buy one.

Beds are like carpets - it's very hard to find an outlet that insists on selling them at full price. We settled on Dreams, which is not only having a multimega 50% sale (okay, Coxeters was having an actual closing down sale, which is hard to beat, but almost everything was gone so we went with the next best thing) but offers a free Dreams sleeping kit with it. This consists of:

• a dream catcher. "Do you believe in dream catchers?" the salesman asked. "No," said the prospective user. You could see the man's face fall.
• a Sounds of Sleep CD, "including soothing compositions from Chopin, Vivaldi and Schubert".
• a sleeping candle, lavender scented.
• a blindfold with a pair of long eyelashed, slumbering eyes tastefully embroidered thereupon.
• a book on Understanding Dreams, (c) Nerys Dee 1991 (relationship to Dr Dee unknown). Open randomly at page 39: "Telepathic communication often takes place during dreams, usually spontaneously." Quietly close it again.

Plus, if we hang onto the documentation, in ten years time we can go back to Dreams and buy a replacement at a discount. Bonusbarn's 26th birthday present is sorted.

Granted, by the end of this Sunday afternoon I've spent more money than I thought I would on Friday evening, but I think good was done. Unusually, he even settled for one of the cheaper options available because he genuinely liked it, despite the salesman's subtle attempts to push him further up the price range. It arrives a week tomorrow.

"I need a new desk," he said as we left the shop ...