Stopping in Bed

It is a confession that ought to be made only under the strictest anonymity, but I do not like getting up in the morning. I have very admiration for those exuberant fellows who are up with the lark each day, who sing in the bathroom while they splash cold water on their bodies, and who monopolize the breakfast-table conversation with their weather reports and their descriptions of the sunrise, but I have no desire to emulate them.  I find those moments when, having been once awakened from my sleep, I turn over and sink back again into semi-consciousness, altogether delightful. I know full well why the alarm clock has become the most hated of human inventions, for I too, resent the tyranny over me. Just when it seems as though I have reached the point when my much needed beauty sleep has come upon me at last, that strident bell breaks in and spoils my hope, demanding my attention to another day of toil. Do you wonder I am seized with a desire to hurl my boot at it- if only I had left a boot within my reach? My only resource is to pull the clothes well over my ears and bitterly regret that I performed the task of winding the thing up the night before so thoroughly. Harry Lauder may have taught us to sing. “It’s nice to get up in the morning”, but I prefer to complete and say, “but it’s nicer to stop in bed”.

Yet I have often reflected upon the strange fact that stopping in bed only seems attractive when it cannot be done. There have been times when my doctor, after feeling my pulse me with his thermometer, had ordered me to go to bed- and stop there. I have then realised how inconvenient stopping in bed can be, for on those occasions I am consumed with the eager desire to be up and doing. I want, then, to do all sorts of things for which, I confess, I do not usually feel the enthusiasm. There is the garden to be dug and that drawer in my desk which needs turning out and a dozen other tasks which, if only I could get up, I would gladly tackle. How I turn and chafe under my enforced idleness. My pillow loses all its downy winsomeness and becomes a thing of straw and stubble; the mattress appears to develop knobs, probably, I am disposed to believe, occasioned by malicious manufacturers who have secreted therein unsuspected lumps of cement, while the bedclothes which ordinarily I had thought to be of orderly rectangular design become things of corners, edges and shapeless inadequacy.

It is then my sympathies go out to those who are completed to stop in bed, not for a day or so (for my own indisposition is but a temporary, ephemeral thing) but for weeks and even months together. I think of those long wards as I have seen them so often, with their rows of beds on either side and often down the centre, every one of them occupied by somebody who is longing for the time when permission will be given to get up.
Have you reflected upon the fact that, within our beloved Hospital the amazing skill of doctors and surgeons, the tireless ministry of matrons, sisters and nurses, the ceaseless service of the domestic staff are all devoted to this end, that people who, because of physical disability are compelled to stop in bed, may be enabled to get up? And that behind all this magnificent service, and absolutely necessary to it, is the need for money? And the more money there is, the more effectively will sick folk be helped to health again, and so be able to get up?
I shall not stop in bed on Carnival Day. I shall be out to join the crowd of merry-makers and lookers-on, and when a collection box is thrust under my nose, whether by painted clown or daintily costumed child, I shall add my coins to the rest, for the sake of those who long for the end of their stopping in bed.