Originally posted by The Clifton Courier, September 4, 2019

Travel is supposed to open your mind. Expand your horizons. Expose you to a way of living vastly different from your own.

Sometimes this makes you consider changing your ways and sometimes this gives you a renewed appreciation for what you have at home.

The latter was very much the case for me after a few weeks gadding about with my sister. As exhilarating and enlightening as it was, I found myself longing for the comforts of home. The specific comfort I’m referring to, of course, is that of a top sheet.

You see, most of the beds we slept in comprised of a bottom sheet on the mattress and some kind of doona. The top sheet, which acts as the Kraft single in the ham and cheese sandwich that is your bed (your body is the ham in this equation, the mattress and doona being the bread) was absent.

It was quite confronting.

Now, before I go into this, I acknowledge that some people just aren’t top sheet people. And I don’t want to go sparking divisions between those of us who use top sheets and those who don’t. It’s an issue so serious it has the potential to tear a society apart.

But I am very much on team top sheet.

So, each time I found myself without one, I would strip my hotel bed, take the cover off the doona, tuck it in as a top sheet and layer my bare doona on top.

I was willing to risk being aware of just how stained and yellowed the hotel doona was underneath the cover and copping the judgement of housekeeping staff for a solid night’s rest. I mean, I did try to sleep without one, but it was a restless night. There’s no new tricks for this old dog. I’m set in my ways. And I need that extra layer of fabric when I sleep.

Part of this is related to the fact that, even when it’s thigh-sticking-to-the-car-seat hot, I like to be covered in some way while sleeping. Even if it’s an extremely-warn, pretty-much-see-through sheet of cotton, I feel as if that sheet gives me protection from the great unknowns of the darkness.

I know a thin layer of fabric will probably do very little in the way of protecting me from a knife-wielding axe murderer (this baddie is so bad he’s got both a knife and an axe and, in my head, is a hybrid of the huntsman from Disney’s Snow White and the robber from Dennis the Menace) or the spirit of a girl who was trapped down a well and can somehow transport herself around the world via video tapes. It’s highly likely that, if creatures of the darkness can sneak into houses through toilets (that scene in Spiceworld where the paparazzi guy climbs out of the loo haunts me to this very day) or walk through walls, they probably couldn’t be thwarted by a simple bed sheet. They probably wouldn’t say “well, I was going to feast on her flesh buuuuut she’s covered by a sheet, so I guess I’ll just take the steakettes from her fridge and skulk off back to the shadows”.

But if there’s a chance that a sheet will protect me, I’m going to take it.

I also like to have the sheet over my ear, to block out the sound of said sinister beings and to keep mice, bugs and any other small living creatures from crawling into my ears as I sleep.

It’s clearly a habit I developed as a child and, as a grown woman, I cannot see a reason why I should stop now. I mean, the top sheet protective lawyer might do nothing. But it could be the very reason I survived my childhood and was able to blossom into the reasoned, well-adjusted adult I am today.

When we arrived back in the Land Down Under, I was sad our trip had come to an end. No more cherry beers with lunch. No more waffles. No more buying new knickers to put off doing the washing. Those days were behind us.

But the nights I knew I had ahead of me counteracted my case of the post-holiday blues. Because no matter how dull day-to-day life would seem compared to gallivanting abroad, I knew there would be a top sheet waiting for me when I got home.

BONUS MATERIAL

**  Please think of this like a deleted scene in the DVD extras. If you could picture me sitting in front of a camera in a director’s chair, that would be very helpful. **

I did not have room for another reason I’m a team top sheet so I had to cut this out. I had already reached my ever-expanding word limit and didn’t want to start a war by basically implying that people who don’t use top sheets sleep in stink pits. 

I just think that, without the top sheet acting as a piece of cling wrap between you and your doona, that blanket is going to get stanky. Yes, stank. Not stink. Stank is a little more than a bad odour. It’s a combination of your dead skin cells flaking off, sweat and all the sins you committedbeing purged from your body in the form of pungent noxious gasses. When you have a top sheet, I imagine it soaks all the gunk up like a paper towel under a pile of freshly-fried schnitties. But without a top sheet to seal it in, all that filth is leaching into the fibres of your doona.

Unless you’re into basting in your own filth, you want to wash your bedding rather regularly. When you’re operating on the two-sheet systems, it’s relatively pain free.

But washing a doona cover and airing it out? That’s a lot of effort.

Shaking the doona out of the oversized pillow case it comes in is annoying, but stuffing it back in there after cleaning is the real hassle. You have to match up the corners and make sure there’s no bunching up, which involves a lot of vigorous shaking, cursing and questioning why you do these things.

Thanks to a top sheet, I only really ever wash my sooner cover if I spill something extremely noticeable on it. And, sure, you could argue that’s just as unhygienic and I’m sleeping underneath a blanket of germs, but I prefer not to do any research into issue in case that turns out to be exactly the case. I enjoy living in ignorance, thank you very much.