My unhealthy relationship with my pillow

This is my kind of pillow talk.

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I was packing for a few days away. My bag was on my bed and as I placed my clothes inside I stole a glance at my pillow. My wonderful pillow. And I realised that was the only thing I wanted to take with me. As I faced three terrible nights with my head on some awful guest pillow in someone else’s house.

And guest pillows are always awful. They are either too fat or too thin or too soft or too hard or too lumpy. They are the reject pillows. They’re often the ones that had been the homeowner’s pillows but they got lumpy and stained and then downgraded to guest pillows. Never take the pillowcase off a guest pillow. At my house anyway.

We’ve come a long way since the first pillows in 7000 BC Mesopotamia that were made of stone. But not so far that we’ve managed to stop them getting brown splodges after about three days.

The following is normal, right? When you get into a different bed you do a trial run with each of the pillows available, which if you’re lucky is four, to try and find the best or the least worst. Each gets around 30 seconds to prove itself. There might even be a second round with the two best ones competing before choosing the ultimate winner. Can I make a suggestion to everyone with a guest bed? Put each pillow in a different coloured pillowcase as sometimes I have to go through the whole contest again the next night as they’ve got mixed up and I can’t remember which one was the winner.

Let me tell you about my pillow. Because I’m dying to and frankly it’s amazing I haven’t yet. It’s from IKEA. I know! Surprising. And it’s called an ergonomic pillow. Which confuses me a bit as ergonomic means designed for comfort and who’s designing a pillow without comfort in mind? (Apart from the Mesopotamian pillow designers 9000 years ago.)

Do the French still use those long sausage pillows? Discovering these on a childhood holiday was more shocking to me than when I first got wind that they ate horses. Some pillows are truly terrible.

Let me describe mine in more detail. It’s not flat. Imagine a really low skateboard ramp with a slight sunken bit in the middle. So nothing much like a low skateboard ramp really. I’d post a photo but I don’t want you to see the brown splodges.

I love it so much. It’s bordering on an unhealthy obsession. But is it okay to turn up at someone’s house with your own pillow? Is this acceptable?

I actually have two pillows. My sleeping one and my reading one. The reading one never gets used on its own. It’s nowhere near that league. It gets stacked on the sleeping one as for some reason I require a slightly steeper neck incline when reading.

I only ever sleep with one pillow as I heard as a child that two pillows give you a double chin. Thinking about this now it seems wrong and that genetics or overeating are more likely culprits for two chins. So where have I got that from? An episode of Grange Hill? Smash Hits magazine? Deenie by Judy Blume? It’s a mystery. Maybe it was just an 80s urban myth like that Marc Almond/stomach pump one.

My love was really tested for my pillow last year as Tom, who has a bad back, asked if he could try it for the night to see if it helped. This is our kind of pillow talk. Even though he was in a lot of pain I was extremely reluctant. Extremely. I actually said no at first but then guilt took hold and I made the swap. I used his flat memory foam pillow and had such a bad dream that I was too scared to go back to sleep again. I swear it gave me a bad dream.

I made him swap back the next night.

Tom also has a lot of pillow stuff going on. In that he sleeps with three pillows IN THE BED and a rolled-up towel. (Actually, that towel is a bit like a French sausage pillow. Sacre bleu! Or for the non-French speakers, sacred blue!) As a result, our bed space is around 70% pillow and 30% body.

I should say that they don’t all go under his head. (Otherwise, he’d have a quadruple chin.) They are all arranged around his body. Under his back, between his clackety knees and one that often migrates to form a barrier between us so he doesn’t ever have to catch a glimpse of me and my perfect pillow.

But it will never be his. Or anybody else’s. I’ve specified in my will it is to be buried with me. As I’m not lying for all eternity without it.

Enough about me, what about you?

-       Have you ever considered taking your pillow with you on holiday?

-       Would you be insulted if someone brought their own pillow to your house?

-       Tell me any unusual pillow habits you’ve encountered.

-       And is your pillow better than mine?