Screen

I protect myself from night draughts with an old Victorian scrap screen.

At least, that's what I say.

The truth is, for someone who drifts fitfully in and out of sleep, there's nothing better to have by your bed than something that attracts your attention without absorbing your mind . The sheer range of pictures keeps me happy for hours.

This is only part of one side but there are portraits of Victoria and Albert and Gladstone and others and flowers and fruit and butterflies, and jingoistically comical renditions of people from other countries - a particularly libellous Dutch boy - and fashion plates and cartoons of famous people of the age (I identified Henry Irving) and hunting scenes and fishing scenes and scenes from history and interesting monuments.. - o its a treat.

I love to think of the children who put this together - sometime in the 1870s I think - with the aid of a taller person (mother? nurse?) to do the top.

Today I have been ill in bed and my screen-world has entertained me prodigiously. It reminded me irresistably of Robert Louis Stevenson's Land of Counterpane (but for Those of Middle Years)


When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.