You can tell a lot about somebody by what they keep on their nightstand. I would advise anybody who hasn’t tried it to pay more attention to other peoples’ nightstands, and even your own. It may well be the portal to a deeper understanding of those around you, as well as yourself. After all, we are defined by our objects. I’m not saying that’s something to be lauded, but in our unforgiving world, hell-bent on unbridled consumerism, it is our possessions that determine so much of our societal standing.
Some misguided individuals still seem to think we live in a meritocracy - they will be thoroughly disabused of that notion when they realise that our class is exclusively based on what is external to us. Our education, the value of our property, whether we would ever buy house wine on a night out - all of these material objects work to project a certain image of ourselves to the outside world. It is this image that we all sit down with and call our ‘class system’. Some people will tell you that we are breaking free of the traditional constraints of the class binary. Those people are wrong. We are just becoming more subtle in the way we impose our boundaries. Sure, working-class people are no longer covered in soot and talking like an extra in Oliver Twist. However, they are still doing their big shop in B&M and trailing around thinking that the only two pasta varieties that exist are ’long’ and ‘‘twirly’. And ‘ravioli’, if you’re one of the lucky ones. It took me 20 years to realise that tagliatelle was a separate thing.
Sure, we cannot hold onto our education as we might the walls of our house as we circumnavigate it at four o’clock in the morning when we need a piss in the dark, but it is still something that we are able to buy. The existence of private education in this country shows us how it is still a commodity, and a very important one at that. And even if you’re not privately educating your children, this culture of buying your offspring extra hours with a local maths tutor or paying for all of their school trips whilst their less wealthy classmates sit and watch old Nicholas Cage films with the geography teacher also imposes a ‘glass ceiling’ system of schooling. And even beyond the classroom, factors such as having the money to buy your children books to read, take them on day trips into the countryside, or enrol them in clubs that expand their minds and improve their social skills, all contribute to the education gap in this country. And it is education that is the most prized possession in this eternal struggle toward social mobility.
The ability to buy stuff, and to keep that stuff around you in a space that you call home, is the epitome of Western privilege. And this collective penchant for objects is embodied by our nightstands' contents. That random assembly of things you chuck onto your bedside table when you’re half-asleep is the analogue equivalent of an online personality test, so unerring accurate is it in diagnosing your latent personality defects. Me, my nightstand betrays me as somebody who struggles too much to control their environment and emotions. The contents of my nightstand is as follows: a picture of myself as a baby in my late grandmothers’ arms; a sleep spray from Sanctuary that was bought for me as a stocking filler and I have used a grand total of twice; a rose gold touch lamp from Argos that you have to touch three times to turn off and on (thanks Argos); the Cockroach by Ian McEwan; a People’s History of the BBC by David Hendy; earplugs and the obligatory mulberry silk eye mask; and finally, my Nintendo switch, which I find myself irreparably addicted to.
From this menagerie of random objects, one can conclude the following: I have an overactive mind at night, can’t really decide which book I want to be reading at any one time, and love Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild too much for a woman approaching the age of twenty-six. Oh yes, and that I really love my grandma. They say that self-knowledge is a journey of constant discovery. Well, not so much if you skip the therapy and head straight for the bedside table. Conversely, my flatmate’s nightstand consists of a mug of half-drunk herbal tea; a Lumi lamp which wakes her up with a digital simulation of natural light at half seven every weekday morning; a tub of Vaseline (for her lips, get your mind out of the gutter); an oversized hairclip; a battered copy of Jon Ronson’s Lost at Sea; and, worryingly, a quite unclean box for her dental retainer. Judge her as you will - she’s a messy bitch, in the best possible way.
Curiously, my other flatmate doesn’t even possess a nightstand. Instead, he uses his desk to keep all his useless objects, such as a tape measure, a pack of king skins, and his £300 Sennheiser headphones. From this, it is possible to ascertain that he’s a workaholic. I feel as though I could do a postgraduate qualification in psychotherapy from my findings.
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