I have a crick in my neck. It probably has something to do with the fact that I spent Thursday evening in a paroxysm of furniture removal. That and the fact that when I woke up this morning, I could see the bedroom carpet and my feet were hanging over the side of the bed too.

It wasn’t that I had had a particularly inebriated evening either (the last time I had a glass of anything alcoholic was at least three weeks ago, and quite a reasonable drop too), but it was due to the fact that I had slept in, and the dog had decided to make herself comfortable. However, in her sprawling comfortably on the end of my bed, she had pushed my legs further and further across the bed. Now usually there is a natural stopper to this migration of limbs, but he had got up early leaving my lower extremities to the tender rearranging of the canid four-foot that lives with us. It was a strange sensation, mostly as it took me a moment or three to work out how come I was in such a position, and then try to work out how to get out of bed.

At first consideration this would not be a particular problem, but there is a sense that getting out of bed on the correct side for one’s self starts the day on the right foot. It is a truly odd thought that after twenty years of married life there is a “right side” and a “wrong side” to the bed for me. It’s a bit like always preferring to go to sleep in one particular position or another. I like falling asleep on my left side, and getting out of bed by stepping from my blankets’ warmth to the left too. But to suddenly have to untangle myself from all the blankets on the bed, and then trying to work out how to stumble out of my bed … it is enough to start one’s day at a distinct advantage. Which is ridiculous when one thinks about it.

Why should getting out of bed on the “wrong side” be a problem? How can there be a “right side” or a “wrong side” to an essentially rectangular sleeping platform? Is it because as mammals we have a tendency to choose one particular side to sleep on rather than another, like dogs always circling to the right before settling? Is it predicated due to natural inheritance (my mother falls asleep on her back, but likes to get out to the left, and both my grandmothers got out on the left too) or is it something cultural due to the escorting of women on the left of a gentleman so that he could ‘defend’ her?

Getting out of bed on the wrong side has always implied an emotional state of being a little on the grumpy side; of misunderstanding the whole point of a day; of being the butt of a joke perpetrated on one by the world that is really rather puzzling as to why everybody else seems to get the point but not you! I really find myself struggling with the possibility that a day like today where I had to really work out which side of bed was the ‘right’ side for me might be one of those joke-days – except that I have a crick in my neck that has lasted all day and was caused by my fighting the blankets to get out of bed, and you have to admit that it is a funny way to get a crick in your neck that lasts all day!