The Great Bed of Ware. What makes it great? Its size. Its greatness is its size. For people to come and ogle. Surely there’s more to this bed than that. Did those who visited the inns of Ware just come to see the bed? Or did they come to love the bed – love in the bed?

I visited the V&A several times. Each time I stood beside my bed and looked at her. She became a ‘she’ early on when I started to associate her with comfort, warmth, safety. Perhaps an older lady. Still attractive, sensual, desirable – but older, wiser. I hate to say experienced but a lady who knows what she wants.

The first couple of visits uncovered little but fact. The town of Ware (a few miles from my home), the inns, the swans of the town, the satyr symbolising lust, the hundreds of years of scratched graffiti.

Graffiti. A possible route? Found words placed together to create a 21st-century love story. No, not for my 62 words. I felt they had to be more personal to me. My story. Not the visitors who came to gawp at this very big bed. This freak. This circus attraction. Is that what she’s become?

Before visiting my bed today, I’d had a couple of ideas. They’d come from my everyday life. Reading, writing, thinking, listening to music.

On Dartmoor a few weeks ago I spoke with some walkers about John Lennon. It was fathers season on the BBC and a programme about Lennon had shown him to be a selfish man, a bad father. I’d always had a soft spot for the Beatle so I defended him. He was in my mind. A few days later, he came up in conversation with my parents. Then a documentary about the Plastic Ono Band came on the iPlayer. I watched. I learned the chords to ‘Love’ on the piano.

Then I scribbled some words. Not connecting them to my bed. Just lyrics. Random. About love. Like Lennon would write.

Just before I visited Dartmoor, I chanced on an article in my local paper. ‘Great Bed of Ware to return on year’s loan’. What a coincidence. It got me thinking. Here goes the bed again, moving around the country for more strangers to stare at. Poor bed. When did she last know love? (I wonder if John and Yoko would’ve enjoyed a bed-in in the Great Bed of Ware.)

I needed 62 words. But until the last couple of days, I didn’t have a definite angle, a voice I trusted in.

Oh how a bad night’s sleep and a Tube journey can fill a man with ideas.

This morning I woke at 5am. I’d had a beautiful dream about a special girl. A girl I doubt I’ll ever see again. In the dream, we were firmly together, bookends. When I woke, I was alone. In an empty bed. A small, single bed. But a big empty bed with just me in it. I felt tired, unwell, lonely. And I knew I had to see my Great Bed again. I was sure today was the day to make that connection with her. To find my story among all the others. And I didn’t expect it to be pretty.

Poems on the Tube. What a fantastic idea. I always read them. Today it was a Caliban speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

What a cracking final line. To cry to dream again. Was that the feeling I’d had this morning? Did I want to return to the comfort of the dream? Or would that just mean waking to hurt again?

Sitting near the Great Bed of Ware in the afternoon, on a leather seat in front of a window with a spotty design, solved the riddle. My dream? My dream was meant to be enjoyed. It was full of good memories, smiles, laughter and happiness. You can only enjoy a nice dream when you’re awake – or your conscious mind doesn’t know about it. It just happens that a conscious mind then adds meaning to it and tries to ruin it. So crying to dream again is a yearning to get back to a safe happiness. Being awake is the challenge – the challenge to find in waking life what you had in the dream.

So what about my Bed?

I watched as tourists wandered up to her. Without exception, they approached with a smile, with mouth open, they turned to check if everyone else had noticed this big bed, they posed for a photo, they smiled again, then they left. No thought for the bed. No thought for the life it once held, the stories it could tell. I felt the bed was sleeping, waiting for us to be alone.

But what would happen if we were alone, she and I? Would it be like the dream, with the special girl? Or would it be a challenge for her – a lady more at ease when asleep?

What if she asked me to touch her – to make her feel like she felt before she became the inanimate object she is today, the lifeless, cold bed? What if she could see my dream, knew I’d woken lonely? And now this young chap is just sitting there writing about me, trying to make me sound pretty, poetic. She needed a voice. The Great Bed of Ware needed to wake from her dream to try to seduce the young man.

With the measured voice of a woman who knows what she wants, she talks to the writer sitting near her. But of course the writer cannot do as she wants. He mustn’t touch her, climb inside her. She is alarmed, out of bounds.

I fear she is destined never to be slept with again. I fear she knows that.

And John Lennon? A phrase from one of his most haunting Beatles’ songs as a title. It came to me as I sat, thought, watched and wrote. Because perhaps, after all, she’s only sleeping.