A few days ago I wrote about collecting two different head injuries in one night – a carpet burn and a black eye. Both are healing well and yesterday as the pain and bruises began to fade, I resolved to take some action to prevent at least one of them happening again.

There’s a limited amount I can do about the carpet burn risk at the moment because I don’t want to pull up my bedroom carpet. But by padding the foot of the bed I can minimise the damage I’d do if I were to head-butt it again in the middle of the night.

The head of my bed and the side that runs along my bedroom wall have been padded since I moved in. The Occupational Therapist provided a number of plastic-covered foam panels that give complete protection and I’ve covered these with fabric to make them look less clinical.

I’ll give the OT team a call tomorrow and ask for a couple of additional panels so I can do the foot of the bed too. But because that might take a little while I decided to make a temporary intervention myself. As I looked around my room for some inspiration I was hit by a brainwave – socks!

Bear with me – it’s not completely daft. I decided to try putting two or three socks over each bedpost and then pulling another sock down over the top of them. This worked even better than I’d hoped. I used a sparkly elastic hairband to hold the whole thing in place and then – da-da! – a fully padded bedpost.

This isn’t the first time socks have come to the rescue. I used them a few years ago to keep my keys in so I didn’t injure myself so much when I whacked my head with them.

So next time you have a problem ask yourself, ‘Could socks do the trick?’