18 February 2026

My duvet has acquired a will of its own

It has made a declaration of independence even with every button on the cover done up

Photo by Ron Koeberer/Millennium Images, Uk

This week I’ve been thinking about entropy. I think about it often. I’m confronted with it every time I write, because I have still not managed to solve the mystery of why the , , , , and, most annoyingly, keys no longer work on my laptop. I have to plug in an external keyboard but this is not optimal and I keep introducing my own entropy with clumsy but overconfident and impatient fingers inserting random letters into every sentence I type. I could have illustrated this by giving you an uncorrected example of what I mean but, for some reason, now I actually want to shoive in a bunch of typos I suddenly started tyoping perfectly. Ah, that’s better. I quite like “shoive”. And “tyoping”.

At least the keyboard arrangement gets me out of bed. (You can’t write with an external keyboard in bed.) Bed has been where most of the entropy has been taking place. I am particularly impressed by the duvet’s success in managing to free itself from the duvet cover. For years I have been resigned to watching pillows jump free of pillowcases at the slightest provocation. Pillowcases are open-ended after all. But the duvet, in a manner that suggests a rudimentary consciousness, has managed to make a unilateral declaration of independence even with every button on the duvet cover done up. I saw the duvet start squeezing itself out of the cover a week ago. It was like watching a nature programme: “The plucky duvet, as it reaches maturity and senses the end of winter approaching, makes its first tentative steps to freedom; in time, and with a bit of luck and a following wind, it will spread its wings and fly from the Hove-l to find a mate.” Well, bully for the duvet, I say. It’s a lot closer to getting laid than I am.

But of course this isn’t the only place that has been operating under the iron second law of thermodynamics, the rule that says that heat cannot be transferred from a colder to a warmer body, that everything goes to shite, and that the vape you lost last week somewhere in the bed has still not been found. (This is probably good riddance: the other night I felt a pang of cravings for it, then realised that this was the rekindling of my nicotine addiction. At the moment it’s perfectly manageable.)

The other area of increasing chaos is the kitchen. You give it a good clean-up and then two months later you have to do it all over again. The bin also needs sorting out; nothing more will fit in it. I tried putting the shells from my breakfast eggies in it and they just bounced straight out again.

But the two things that have been bothering me are… hang on a sec. My editor doesn’t like it when I talk about cats, as I’ve mentioned before. I might also have mentioned he doesn’t like it when I mention my body. I have good news and bad news for him: the good news is that this is a cat-free column. The bad news is that I have still not had my wax-blocked ear syringed, although I gather the preferred term these days is “irrigated”. The machine at the GP broke down and apparently it is too expensive to fix. So I asked at Boots and they said “yes” but I didn’t look at the small print. They charge £60 – £60! Do I look like I’m made of money?

More body horror: I had an appointment at the Royal Sussex County Hospital to talk about my forthcoming gallbladder operation. Since the Royal Sussex is currently under investigation for 90 deaths that occurred over a six-year period, I was going to ask if the op was strictly necessary. A friend who has lived in Brighton for decades told me I was one of the few people he knew who had come out of the hospital in decent shape. Anyway I didn’t go, because I simply couldn’t face it. I shall kick this problem into the long grass, where it belongs.

No, what’s bothering me right now is my beard. (“Oh God, not this again,” says my editor. Look, would you rather I wrote about the toilet seat, which also needs fixing, instead? Thought not.) For the last couple of weeks I’ve been cultivating one not so much as a deliberate decision but as a capitulation to the forces of idleness and despair. It is now driving me absolutely insane. The last time I grew one – I think I’ve mentioned this, too – was to impress a woman. Well, that worked like a chocolate teapot. Anyway Beard Mk II has reached the stage where standing up at the sink to remove it isn’t going to work. I’m going to have to immerse myself in a bath to get rid. Damn it, I’m going to do it right now.

Half an hour later…

Oh wow, that’s better. So much better. It took a couple of passes with soap and razor – “who’d have thought the old man had so much hair on him?” – but I feel liberated. I have now remembered that my usual editor is off; he won’t see how I have teased him. Blast. Next week: cats.

[Further reading: Tony Blair is old Labour now]