"I didn't."
"What do you want one for?"
"For siestas."
"I've got a day bed you can have if you like."
"A day bed?"
"Yes. It's a bed designed for use during the day."
"Gosh," I said. "Thank you", and I brought it home with me and it is standing in my study as I type, just over my left shoulder, and I think it is the most admirable piece of furniture ever made, and it is beckoning.
Some people claim not to be morning people. I am not an early-afternoon person, at least as regards deskwork. I can play cricket or fell trees or walk dogs but, if I sit at my desk between one o'clock and four, the eyelids droop, the body sags and I hear the call of the horizontal. It has been so for as long as I can remember.
Teaching a fifth-form class one sunny afternoon, I ran out of energy and set the kids some work to do and sat at my desk to mark essays and well, when I came to it was to see a class of 30 all looking at me and grinning. I had propped my head up with my hand, my elbow on the desk, and my mouth had fallen open and I was drooling.
"Good afternoon sir," said one of the brighter boys.
"Good afternoon," I said.
At university I used to lock the door of my room after lunch and take a work of serious literature to bed with me and wake two hours later with George Eliot face down on my chest.
Then after university I went to work in Spain. Spain was a revelation. Until then I had thought I was the only one who slept in the afternoon. In Spain on the stroke of noon down came the shutters.
Only the bars stayed open and even they were muted. At four those heavy metal shutters went back up again and the day resumed.
I loved it, felt utterly at home, slept every afternoon. And the best of the bedrooms I slept in was in Calle de Predicadores where our tumble-down third-floor apartment had begun life in the middle of a tenement block but the end two sections had been demolished so that my bedroom wall, which was a mere partition, had become the end wall of the building.
From the street you could see wallpaper still hanging from it and it had cracks in it through which the afternoon sun would stream in shafts across the foot of my bed. Had I rolled violently against it I might have crashed to a certain death. Nowhere have I slept better.
A siesta is and isn't sleep. It's generally light, three quarter sleep, with dreams. And what vivid, manipulable dreams. Never once of an afternoon have I had a bad one, though I am prone to them at night.
And now I have a day bed. The phrase sings of Jane Austen mothers, gossipy, valetudinarian, strapped into corsets, frantic to marry off their daughters for sound economic reasons, and insisting on the delicacy of their own nerves.
It looks like a regular sofa except that the back is low, flat and wooden because the thing is not made to be comfortably sat on. There's the original, thinnish mattress, stuffed with what feels like lumps of horsehair, and with that authentic second-hand furniture smell of dust and grandparents.
Beneath that is thick wire mesh stretched taut by a simple tensioner. A low bedhead at each end, a wooden frame and four stout legs and there it stands, my day bed, and I love it and I am going to it now.
