This isn't so much a rant, as me imploring that you treasure the little things you have. Here's my ode to a bedside table
It’s night time. I’ve been waking myself up with a large snore as my head nods off for the last five minutes or so, but I really want to get to the end of this chapter before I officially turn in for the night. Alas, my body has other ideas, and as I quietly accept the fact that it’s time for slumber, I remember the thing that sets my mind raging every single night: I have no bedside table.
“What a stupid thing to dwell on. I could live totally fine without a bedside table. This lady has lost the plot!” I hear you saying these things in your mind while you read this, but let me tell you, it’s a sad, sad life; this life sans bedside table. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.
I mean, when you’re falling asleep on your book, the last thing you want to do is crawl down your bed that only just fits in your Hong Kong-sized bedroom–no, you can’t lie across it horizontally–and get up and dump that MOFO in the living room: nah-uh! There’s nowhere for glasses to rest safely during the night, nowhere to stash the hoard of pills you now find yourself taking every evening and the requisite glass of water, there’s just nowhere to put things, and you soon realise that this tiny little storage object means the world to you.
Ode to a bedside table
Oh wood! Oh wood that holds together
Splendid does your majesty be.
Betwixt the pale form where I doth slumber
Thou perfect form on floor does rest,
And carry nightly weight I beg of you;
For only those without could ever know
The importance of that drawer of which you hide.
If I had a dollar for every time I uttered: “One day, we’ll live in a house with bedside tables,” then I would have quite a few more dollars than I have now. Also inside this glorious house that lies in my future will be an oven.
Ovens make life so much easier, but most small HK apartments don’t have them. Sure, you can grab one of those little counter top ones, but it’s just not the same, especially when you want to prepare a Bacchanalian-style dinner party. How many times have you been to a friend’s apartment and coveted their oven? In Hong Kong that’s a normal state of being.
After I have somewhere to place my latest tome, and a machine to roast copious amounts of vegetables to my heart’s content in, I will ensure that my new home has running hot water in the kitchen and bathroom sinks. I can’t tell you how many apartments I have lived in in Hong Kong where the sinks only run cold water. But why though?
It’s a cruel and unusual annoyance. How are you meant to do the dishes? How are you meant to wash your face?
And speaking about washing things, can we talk about baths? I honestly think there’s a business in just renting really amazing bath pods out by the hour here. It sounds kind of gross when I say it out loud, but think high class bathing, with really lush products and bubbles for days and a button you can push to order wine and canapes.
At our last apartment, they’d removed the bath to put in a really poorly designed rain shower that you couldn’t use because it flooded over the side of the tiny shower cubicle. What kind of sadist does that to a gal who just wants to come home and draw a sexy AF bath once in a while?
Anyway, if you’re lucky enough to have a bedside table, maybe give it a little extra polish this month cos, in the immortal words of 80s American rock band Cinderella: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”