Duvet Duels

I assume that most of you, at least once in your lifetime, have attempted the act of duvet-covering; that excruciatingly frustrating task of re-covering your duvet after you have washed the cover.

You know what I’m talking about.

You have the freshly washed cover in your hands, beautifully folded, and the duvet it once belonged to in a heap on the floor, looking less and less every minute like something that once hid the hideous sheets on your creaky bed. You look at the cover in your hand, then at the duvet on the floor. The cover, the duvet, the cover, the duvet, the cover, the duvet…and so it goes. As you have a mental battle with the bedding, time is passing and you eventually give in and leave the cover on the floor with the duvet and say you’ll come back to it, and you go about your day.

By the time it gets to bed time, you have forgotten that today was washing day, and you’ve also forgotten about the ever growing pile of bedding on your floor. You enter your room and the realization hits you. You die a little inside. Then you man-up, and prepare yourself for the looming confrontation ahead.

At this stage you have several tactics, several plans in order to conquer your enemy.

First option: lie the duvet on the floor, flat out, the cover next to it, length wise, end to end. You can then slip the duvet ends into the cover, and try to pull the cover up and over (and under at the same time). Result: a gigantic heap of far-from-folded bedding items, with you at the bottom of the pile.

Second option: Stand inside the duvet cover, arms outstretched on the inside, holding the two top corners. Then, with your teeth, pull the duvet up from the floor (some aerobics may be necessary at this stage) until you are confident that you can quickly grab the duvet corners, but still maintain the appropriate width you had established with your outstretched arms. Eventually, after about a million carefully planned moves, you may get the corners of the duvet and the corners of the cover united. You may not. Even if you do manage to achieve this, the result: you have a smile on your face, knowing you have conquered the duvet/cover situation, only to drop your smile quickly when you realized you are now stuck in a duvet, cover and all.

Third option: Turn the cover inside out, and put your arms through to the top end. Unlike option two, do not actually enter the cover. Holding the corners tightly, grab the corners of the duvet, and try to right-way the cover, while still holding the duvet on the inside…which is actually the outside. This is often the best way to replace a duvet cover, but can result: in you falling head first onto your bed, or, more often than not, the hard floor. In turn, this may result in concussion.

Whichever option you go for, there is no neat and tidy way of putting a cover on a duvet. With a great sigh, you flop down on your bed, exhausted, but somewhat pleased with yourself for tackling such a large project at 11pm at night. As you spread your duvet on the bed, realize you haven’t done up the buttons (and take another 20 minutes doing that because the buttons are so fiddly, and let’s face it, you have stubby fingers) you spot a slight bump in the fabric. You pat around for a second and with great frustration, anger and annoyance, you discover that you managed to put a gigantic fold in the blanket and it is now twisted inside the cover. At this stage in the evening, you are so perturbed that you vow never again to wash your duvet cover, and so never have to undergo this agonizing incident in the future.

That is, of course, until the day that your significant other yells at you to change the cover, or the rats that live in your room do.

You can read more from Anjali Kemp on her blog.

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