After ten or twelve years of faithful service, my bed finally fell irrevocably to bits yesterday.

It’s not that it wasn’t a good bed, it’s just that it wasn’t designed for being moved around much. The joints were supported by thin dowels and highly-stressed bolts and… OK, it was never a very good bed. I was just fond of it because I bought it with Nicki shortly before we got married. Actually, I now recall that the central beam splintered and had to be repaired before Nicki died, so it can’t have lasted more than a couple of years before it started to come apart. A couple of years ago I gave up on the dowels and started banging nails into it, and I’m surprised it lasted as long as it has. But now it’s a pile of wood in the corner of my room. Rather nice rimu wood, though, so I’m trying to think whether I can recycle it for some other purpose.

So I went to look at bed shops this afternoon. I wasn’t looking forward to this, as my usual experience of shopping for expensive items runs as follows.

Step One: I think about how I will use the item and formulate a short mental list of general requirements, that I’d expect to be fairly easy to meet.

Step Two: I visit some shops and discover that no manufacturer in the world has ever thought to combine even two of my requirements in an affordable product.

So, for example, when I first set out to buy a cellphone (some years ago now) my two basic requirements were that I could sync its contact list with my computer, and that it didn’t look stupid. My bar for stupidity was not high: if the 5 key was the same shape, size and colour as the 3 key, I was prepared to deem it non-stupid. It turned out that syncing your contacts was universally deemed to be a high-end feature only suitable for phones that cost more than $1000 and were riddled with features I didn’t want. Not looking stupid was not apparently a priority at any price point. After several weeks I gave up and bought the cheapest non-stupid phone I could get. Its user interface is a mess, and it can’t keep time correctly (its clock unaccountably loses about ten minutes a day), but I figured it would have to do until a reasonably-priced syncable non-stupid phone came onto the market. That was four years ago. I have had similar problems with stereos, shoes, furniture, home theatre components… and pretty much everything that costs more than a hundred dollars. This is not a problem with me. It is a problem with the world.

I can think of two cases in which I found it easy to buy an expensive item. The first was my house, for which my requirements were that it have four bedrooms, one with an en-suite bathroom, and be within fifteen minutes’ walk of where I walked. Bill the real estate agent found one just like that and took me straight to it, and it was just what I wanted. We looked at a dozen other places just to make sure, but that really wasn’t necessary.

The second such case occurred today while looking for replacement beds. I found exactly what I was looking for in the first place I walked into, a shop oddly named Not Just Beds that clearly sold Just Beds. It had some beds in the front, and a room in the back where the proprietor made the beds, and he could fulfill all my requirements (made of recycled rimu, no sticking-up bit at the foot end, connected by something more substantial than bolts and dowels). As with the house, I felt obliged to go and look at some other places, but I knew I wouldn’t find anything better.

I’d like to say I ordered my new bed right away, but actually I wandered around looking at beds I wasn’t interested in until after Not Just Beds had closed for the day. So I’ll have to go back another day.