She is like me in many ways, but not necessarily in aesthetic ways. When I felt that a pastel or floral-themed sheet set would be more in keeping for sheet sets for young girl she was thinking along the lines of a Mondrian-inspired print, and she favoured white sheets with black and red geometric stripes. I flinched at that choice, but it was hers and she really liked her choice, so who was I to say otherwise?

She thought she would expand on the theme and transform her entire bedroom to reflect those colours. Her mother didn't mind. In fact her mother helped her daughter to paint one short wall of her odd-shaped bedroom a stark red. And an opposing black emphasized the completion of the theme on yet another wall, while the remainder were left white. An adventure in interior design obviously, pleasing to our granddaughter's critical eye; an offense to mine.

But again; her choice. So when, last week, I went shopping for a duvet for her bed, I also looked at duvet covers. And I thought some of them were really attractive; so much so that I bought a new one for our own duvet, emphasizing softly-coloured spring flowers. But for her? That would hardly do. To my relief there on the shelves of the large linen area of the JYSK outlet we shopped at were duvet covers that were bright red overall superimposed with large figuratively nominal black-or-yellow-outlined blossoms.

And sure enough, she liked it, enormously, when I showed it to her a day later. Thanking us for having bought her a duvet, despite her having said time and again she preferred we would not. She had grown accustomed to using the feather-bed that we'd erroneously bought for her years earlier in place of a duvet. Now the feather-bed can go where it belongs, under her, during the upcoming long icy winter nights, and the duvet over, as it should.