The Duvet Day

Early in Mr. Los Angeles’ and my union, I had been being somewhat too industrious and behaving somewhat too responsibly for somewhat too long, and needed a day off.

Photo by Frosty Ilze on Unsplash

“I’m taking a duvet day,” I told Mr. Los Angeles.

“What’s that?” he said.

“It’s a day when I do nothing,” I said. “Not because I’m sick or because it’s a holiday, but just because nothing is what I’ve decided to do.”

“You mean a mental health day,” said Mr. Los Angeles.

“No,” I said. “I don’t mean a mental health day.” What Americans call a mental health day sounded just a little too wholesome and approved for the day I had planned for myself: it smacked of sitting in a chair in a waiting room for someone in a white coat to give me a form attached to a clipboard, granting me official permission to take time off. My proposal was for something that was just a little less authorized and just a little more wayward – a day for which the English have, to my mind, the perfect description. “I mean a duvet day.”

We didn’t have duvet days back when I was living in London; in fact, most of us didn’t even have duvets. We had two or three scratchy woolen blankets on our beds, which we laid over the sheets and tucked firmly around the mattress to protect us from the whistling wind outside: the idea was to arrange the blankets to lie evenly in a pile, but inevitably one would slip down to the bottom and another ride over to the side, so that we would spend our nights shivering around our shoulders, roasting around our feet, and pulled by centrifugal force to lie on precisely the side we didn’t want to lie on, but we suffered it because the alternative was to get up in the cold and re-make the bed altogether. Happy times.

I did know one person in my London days who boasted – and, oh, lordy, did he like to boast about it – a duvet: Leslie, the editor of the teen magazine I worked for in my twenties. Leslie was small of stature, whip-smart, and impeccably fashionable: he went dancing at the Roxy club, and cooked nouvelle cuisine food, and had early on bought a duvet at Habitat on Tottenham Court Road, an item he lost few opportunities to bring into the conversation, frequently accompanied by cat-got-the-cream hints of what he would do under and around it with his occasional boyfriend George.

George was a genial young broth of a cutting-edge London fashionista, who favored a wonderfully exotic and outrageous style of dress, in which he and his similarly gorgeous entourage would parade the grey streets of London like a pride of beautiful young peacocks, and who quite touchingly never failed, when our paths would cross on Oxford Street, to fall on my sartorially unremarkable self with cries of delighted enthusiasm – “’Allo! ‘Ow are ya? Say ‘allo to Les!” I liked George a lot.

Leslie died, heartbreakingly, of AIDS at just 39, but George is still around: he later added Boy to his name and became really quite famous as a singer. I think of Leslie every time I see George on television, and was tickled magenta to see that both the bedroom accessory and its owner warranted a mention in George’s autobiography, Take It Like A Man. George wrote there that he had loved Leslie, and so did I.

We don’t have duvets in California, we have quilts; but even if I did have a duvet, I wouldn’t waste my precious duvet day by staying underneath it. My thinking is that any old slug can lie in bed doing nothing, and, while certainly agreeable, it's not a huge deal because you're lying in bed anyway – alone, obviously, because if there are two of you involved, it has become something markedly other than a duvet day – and what else are you going to do? However. If you impose the basic self-discipline to get yourself up, showered, and respectably dressed, eat a healthy breakfast to provide nutrition for the day ahead, pour yourself a sustaining cup of tea or coffee, brush your teeth like a good upstanding citizen, and then do nothing ... now, that's taking the experience to a different level.

I don’t do literally nothing on a duvet day. I do what I’ve always liked to do best in the world, which is read a book: admittedly not the most interesting activity to describe, but one that has been transporting me to magical kingdoms of delight ever since those oddly angled lines in my school book suddenly transformed themselves into stories all those years ago. I sit myself down in a favored chair, by the bright living room window in the winter or under the shady umbrella on the patio in the summer; I dive into my book – one I have carefully chosen to provide the perfect balance of entertainment and heft, a detective story, let us say, but a P.D. James rather than an Agatha Christie – and simply, ecstatically, stay there. I don’t answer the telephone, I don’t approach my computer. It’s just me and the book and the undiluted joy of the morning.

After an hour or so, for the sake of variety, I might bestir myself to find a cup of coffee and a cookie and do the Wordle without which a day is not a day. If I were the sort of sad and strange individual who also found it entertaining to play the desperately pathetic online game of four Wordles in one that is called Quordle, then I imagine I’d do that too. If I were even sadder enough and even stranger enough to have joined a Whatsapp group formed of equally peculiar fellow Quordlers, I suppose I’d send my scores along to the other oddballs in the group so that we could all compare Quordle notes (yes, I know); but since I am, happily, not a Quordler but a well-adjusted and productive member of society, I wouldn’t know about that, I merely mention it hypothetically in passing.

Depleted by this frenzy of activity, I return to my book, and stay there. The sun is now high in the sky and streaming bliss upon me, either through the living room window or directly onto the patio; I might just stay fully awake until lunchtime, or then again, this being a duvet day, I might just not. Lunch is simple, something tasty foraged from the refrigerator, and wine is often involved because if you can’t have wine with lunch on a duvet day, when can you? The afternoon mirrors the morning, with hour after sumptuous hour of nothing to do and nowhere to be, until by the time the day is done, I am reduced to an amorphous puddle of pure relaxation smiling fatuously over the Door Dash menu. My opinions are obliterated, my conversation insipid bordering on the inane: Mr. Los Angeles adores my duvet days.

But I do take time along the way to think of Leslie. I mourn him and reflect on what a cruel and duplicitous trick nature played on those beautiful young men who fell victim to AIDS. I wonder what his savagely sharp wit and fierce crusader’s spirit would have made of the world we inhabit today, and hope that there are young people growing up now who will show us a way out of the mess we are currently in and lead us to happier times ahead.

And I wonder whatever became of his famous duvet from Habitat on Tottenham Court Road.