Size matters

Size matters, and I know this because we’ve lost our tape measure, so I had to guesstimate the length of my new curtains using ‘my mind’ and a 15cm ruler.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t fit. ‘They sort of fit,’ I said encouragingly, standing with my little sister at the opposite end of my bedroom. ‘I could move my bed, so that you can’t see that they’re too short.’ ‘Yes,’ my little sister agreed doubtfully. ‘But then when you close them, they’ll fall onto your head.’ I considered this briefly, because when I was little I had these sort of lace canopy things over my bed, which provided hours of pretending I was a princess, until my little brother got over-excited and yanked them off the wall. ‘That could be very pleasant,’ I suggested. My little sister’s face suggested otherwise. (I think she was still a little jealous, because her bed was noticeably devoid of any princess-like aspirations. I told her at the time this was because she was adopted, and that mum and dad didn’t like her as much).

We took the too-short curtains down, and now I wake up at 5.30am, because I haven’t yet replaced them. This has given me a great deal of time to lie and squintingly examine other aspects of my bedroom, very little of which meets with my approval. Yesterday, therefore, I bought a new pair of bedside tables. My little sister and her friend watched in amusement as I assembled them without the aid of a drill (I used instead my patented ‘brute force manoeuvre’, and simply smacked the flat of my hand against the wood until it quietened into submission. (This is the same technique I used with my little sister, until she turned 10, and was bigger than me).

Filled with a sense of accomplishment, I got stuck into my next task: making a birthday card for my friend. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to make: our heads, on top of otters, holding hands in water. I dutifully printed out the photo of the floating otters, and began scouring facebook for suitable photos of our heads. ‘This one is perfect,’ I told my little sister. ‘I look great, and it’s about the same size as that photo of my friend looking weird.’ (It was imperative that our heads were properly proportioned, or the whole thing would have looked very silly).

I got distracted at this point, and was busy realising that the bedside tables I had assembled were very much smaller than the height of my bed, so I wasn’t there when the photos of our heads printed out. ‘They’re the wrong size,’ my little sister called out helpfully. ‘It’s not an exact science,’ I replied. ‘I’ll just trim them a bit with these nail scissors.’ (Our full-sized scissors are currently with our tape measure somewhere, playing a very impressive game of hide-and-seek). ‘OK,’ my little sister replied. ‘I’ll leave them in the kitchen.’

Which I thought was odd, until I walked into our kitchen to see this:

Like I said, size matters.