hot-bedding

 The pandemic left international students in Australia with no jobs, no income and no support. One of the results of this is the increase in the practice of hot-bedding, that is, sharing not just a room but a bed, with each person allocated a certain amount of time at a certain time of the day or night to sleep.  In Australia these people all share the flat but need to organise their sleeping times.  In the Philippines it is possible to rent just a bed space. Such people are called bed spacers.  We haven’t quite reached that point but hot-bedding is a step along the way. It seems that in the FIFO mining industry hot-bedding has been part of the way of life for some years. There it refers to the use of a bed by two people working different 12-hour shifts, or the use of a room by people who work one week on and one week off.  It is officially known as motelling.

A contributor has pointed out that the pratice of hot-bedding has existed under the name Box and Cox in British English. A Box and Cox arrangement was one in which two people took turns in occupying the same space or position, or the same job or role. This came from a farce written in 1847 in which two characters, Box and Cox, occupy the same apartment, one by day and the other by night, each one being quite oblivious of the existence of the other.