Contents of your bedside cabinet reveal so much...

WHAT’S on your dressing table, bedside drawers, cabinet or unit? Have a look. It says everything.

I currently have a pair of reading glasses, indigestion tablets, a Covid vaccination card, some clothes pegs I forgot to take out of me pockets when I got the washing line, a book on the history of Northumbria, a crumpled supermarket loyalty card with the phone number of a bloke who mends hoovers scrawled on it, and an untouched mug of freezing cold tea I was too knackered to drink when I crawled into bed last night.

The little things say a lot; the clutter we take out of our pockets acts as a metaphor for, or snapshot of, our lives at a particular point.

How different my bedside cabinet clutter when aged 20 would look in comparison. Firstly, there would be a card from a nightclub, usually Julie’s, Maddison’s or the Stage Door (with the little figure of a bloke leaning against a lamppost). If I had been really lucky – or really hammered – there might have been a napkin or torn beer mat with a hastily scribbled phone number on it.

You would struggle to remember who gave it to you; was it a striking beauty with a face off Baywatch or an Ernest Borgnine lookalike with a mug straight from Crimewatch?

In the time before mobiles you also ran the risk that the number you rang – even if genuine – might not actually be answered by by the person you’d copped off with during the snogging section at the end of the night. Songs such as George Michael’s Careless Whisper, Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime by the Corgis, or a classic from Odyssey called If You’re Looking for a Way Out, were all winners if you wanted to get close to a girl at a disco.

Phones tended to be downstairs in the hallway where they were answered by irate dads or nosey mams – a situation made worse if you couldn’t read the name on the card or hadn’t remembered it in the first place.

To return to the beside cabinet of my youth, the only medical product on there, would be a pack of three items which would only be used if the phone number on the beer mat had led to a successful outcome. These were more an expression of forlorn hope or desperate optimism than any prowess as a lurve machine.

Indeed, some classic ’80s prophylactics are possibly fossilising on some dusty and long-forgotten bedside table in a darkened pensioner’s spare room somewhere.

There’d be smellies too; some Brut, Hai Karate or, if you were sophisticated, maybe some Kouros – all of which could be splashed on for leaving the house for some action.

This is in stark contrast to the Ibuprofen gel or Deep Heat I have on my current cabinet and am forced to apply before leaving the house after periods of inaction. One glaring omission from the bedside of my youth would be any sort of electronic smart device. This would seem unthinkable to most folk today, not just the millennials.

The palaver of having bedside access to a phone, a reading book, an alarm clock, a diary, a calendar, your music collection, a telly, a video player, some video cassettes, a radio, some photos, a notebook, a tape recorder, a torch, a set of encyclopaedias, a newspaper and a heart rate monitor, would have meant building an extension.

One thing, however, remains constant throughout our lifetime bedside cabinet adventure; where the hell did all the loose change come from? If we all collected our bedside shrapnel up and banked it, the global pandemic deficit would soon be a thing of the past...