Alarm Call

IT seems hard to believe that there was a time in the recent past when the very thought of a husband and wife sharing a bed was considered unhealthy. Writing in his 1919 volume, Sleeping for Health, Dr. Edwin Hinds remarked that separate beds "promote comfort, cleanliness and the natural delicacy that exists among human beings." By the 1940s, at least in England, attitudes were starting to change and married couples had come to regard the former obsession with separate beds as emblematic of either a failed marriage or some kind of sexual dysfunction.

I find this rather interesting, particularly when the precise opposite is true of modern politics. This is not to suggest that politicians always specialise in failed marriages or sexual dysfunctionality - and it simply wouldn't be fair to tar the 1.3% who don't with the same pox ointment - but nasty geopolitical realities such as neocolonialism, vodka-cola and Zionist imperialism have undoubtedly relied on the grand illusion that differing ideologies cast their oppressive weight onto the long-suffering bedsprings of parted mattresses and it is certainly not beyond the palest of sheets to suggest that carving up the boudoir among themselves means concealing the scandalous fact that they are cosying up to one another like two peas in a pod. Rather than let sleeping dogs lie, therefore, we must awaken from our somnambulism and expose the dirty dealings of these secret bedfellows like a tabloid journalist snapping away from the confines of an adjacent wardrobe.