EVER wondered why you sleep on your side of the bed? When we were newly-weds, I slept on the left. But when the kids came along and we had to move to a bigger house, my side automatically moved to the right.

When we moved again, we had to stay in a rented house for a couple of months, and my side of the bed mysteriously returned to the left. Then, when we moved into our current house, I was back on the right.

Why? Well, the answer struck me last week when we were having a dreaded 'sleep-over'. For the uninitiated, sleep-overs are when the kids ask to have their friends to stay overnight.

Girl sleep-overs are bearable. My nine-year-old daughter and her friends stay in her bedroom, ban boys from entering, compare Beanie Babies, and giggle 'til midnight. Compared to boys, they do it reasonably quietly.

Boy sleep-overs are living nightmares. They wrestle, they have pillow fights, they have battles. To say they run around like headless chickens would be potentially libellous to poultry. And they are very, very loud.

We had an enforced boys' sleep-over last week because it was our eldest's 11th birthday. He wanted a wall-climbing party (how appropriate) at a local leisure centre with best friends Jack and Adam, and begged for them to be allowed to sleep overnight.

The wall-climbing, up artificial rock-faces, was great fun but it didn't tire them out enough. They came home, ran amok, ate a mountain of food, then retired to watch a James Bond video.

They eventually settled down for the night, squashed into the same room, and talked into the small hours. Correction, they shouted into the small hours, while I lay in bed, sighing deeply, and wondering if all boys are born with congenital hearing problems.

The alarm clock showed it was just after 3am when a voice half-woke me: "Adam's been sick and it's all over his sleeping bag."

I heard the voice but the message got lost on the way from my brain to my legs. They just wouldn't swing out from under the covers. It didn't matter because Mum, bless her, was out of the bed in a flash, through the door and into the boys' bedroom before I had chance to move. She had the mattress stripped and clothes in the washing machine before I'd fully woken up.

The messy drama was all but over by the time I'd reached the boys' bedroom door to show willing with a sleepy "Is there something wrong?".

It was the following day, when I was fully awake, that I realised there has been a common denominator dictating which side of the bed I sleep on. It's been subconscious, honest, but whether it's been left or right, it's always been the side that's furthest away from the bedroom door. I wonder why that is?

THE THINGS THEY SAY...

A FEW years back, a mum living in Whitley Bay had taken to her bed with a nasty bout of flu. A neighbour called at the house and the flu victim's four-year-old daughter answered the door.

"Is your mum in?" asked the neighbour.

"No," said the little girl, "she's upstairs in bed with the lodger."

The neighbour scuttled away, a little shocked to say the least. Little did she know that 'the lodger' was the family's name for the hot water bottle, which tended to be swapped around the various beds in the house on cold winter nights.

A CONVERSATION between two older girls and their six-year-old friend.

11-year-old: "Boys are so unintelligent."

12-year-old: "And they have such a weird sense of humour."

Six-year-old: "And they never leave a finger space between their words!"

* Don't forget the new Dad At Large book, Dad At Large 2 - To Vasectomy And Beyond", is on sale at Ottakars in Darlington and at Northern Echo offices. Priced £5, £1 goes to the Butterwick Children's Hospice for every book sold.

Published: Friday, July 13, 2001