100 Pointless Things In The World: Cushions On Beds.

I have a friend who works in a cushion factory. She doesn't earn much, but she's comfortable.

Cushions are like home-furnishing heroin. You buy one cushion for the sofa (because the sofa, which is essentially made out of cushions, needs a cushion). Before you know it, you've bought two more, for the corners of the sofa, then another two, one for each armchair.

No problem so far, right? You simply have five cushions. You're aware, of course, that the number of cushions you actually need is none, but you are only five over this limit, so no harm done.

But now you find yourself thinking about cushions at work.  Perhaps browsing the odd cushion website in your lunch-hour, nothing serious. You decide that the chair in the dining room would look pretty good with a cushion. And, now you look again at the sofa with its three lonely cushions, you suddenly realise that it could probably take five (maybe seven?), and the armchairs were surely built for two cushions each.

This is the point at which your family (it's always the family who suffer most) start politely putting sofa cushions on the floor before sitting down. They don't mean to be rude, but there are so many cushions that they're forced to be on the edge of their seat, even when watching Countryfile.

All you want to do now is buy cushions. You start hanging around John Lewis at lunchtime with other addicts. You see a cushion you love - plump, velvety, soft - but you can think of nowhere to put it. The sofa now has fourteen cushions on it, and your family has long ago had to abandon the living room to cower, frightened, in their bedrooms. The armchairs each have, th- Wait....rewind. Did somebody mention bedrooms?

What a fool you've been! Your bed! Thirty-six square feet of virgin uncushioned pasture! Your prayers are answered. You could fit an almost infinite number of cushions of different shapes and sizes on your bed!

Your addict brain ignores the fact that there is no earthly reason to put a cushion on a bed. I mean, you have heard of pillows. You also know that for the rest of your life you will have to take every single cushion off the bed before you go to sleep, then put eery single one back on the bed after you've got up. You know you might as well be putting cushions on the kitchen worktop, clearing them away every time you prepare a meal, or piling them high inside the front door, brushing them aside every time you want to go out.

If you are reading this and you - or someone close to you - insists on putting cushions on beds, it is not too late to seek help. Sit them down, tell them you love them, but tell them it has to stop. Though, obviously, it's best to do this in a neighbour's house, as there is no longer anywhere to sit in yours.