Get the latest status symbol ... separate bedrooms

WHEN Carrie Symonds goes to Balmoral in September, she and Boris will be allocated separate bedrooms. The Queen doesn’t do unmarried sex.

Well, no doubt she’s perfectly aware that it happens but at Balmoral the bedroom arrangements conform to her great-grandfather Edward VII’s template – at the time, devised to actually aid extramarital activities. Single guests are given their own rooms but diplomatically positioned close enough together to allow for corridor creeping.

Joy unconfined. The creaking of t he fl oorboards as you t i ptoe along in your pyjamas, the click of the heavy bedroom door terrifyingly amplified in the night-time hush of the castle, a whiff of the illicit, the delightful hurly burly of the four- poster – surely a bit of an escapist thrill for a man with the nation’s future in his hands.

Sometimes it seems that half of life is spent desperately wanting t o share a bed and other half trying to avoid it. Most of us remember longing to be allowed to sleep with our boy or girlfriend at home and the parental disapproval to be overcome.

Even nowadays it’s hard to know what’s right when it comes to our own children.

But bedroom dilemmas are not the sole province of the young. Recently, I’ve noticed how many people I know prefer to sleep separately – and not just the aged.

Temperature preferences, incompatible body clocks, chronic insomnia, jet-lag, a World Service habit – are all quoted as reasons for one of them taking over the spare room.

Of course, the Edwardians got it right in the first place, placing small dressing rooms next door to the marital chamber with a con- venient single bed for husbands to retire to on occasion.

Separate bedrooms are becoming a lifestyle status symbol. Perhaps Boris and Carrie will adopt the practice back in their Downing Street flat…