No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives… They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures which live quiet private lives in the marshes of Squornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seem to mind and all of them are called Zem…

…The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in more common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic sort of way, moving a fairish body of water as it did so. It blew a few bubbles up through the water engagingly. Its blue and white stripes glistened briefly in a sudden feeble ray of sun that had unexpectedly made it through the mist, causing the creature to bask momentarily.

(D.N.A always wrote so much better than I can ever hope to. Naturally those last two paragraphs were purloined from the HHGTTG via the Plain Vanilla page…)

Now I have introduced the topic, let me say without further flolloping that we NEED a MATTRESS. When M had the brain surge and sold all our possessions to the people that bought our house, naturally that included our bed… and our mattress. The mattress side of things I was not worried about relinquishing, as ours had kind of begun to sag. Upon our arrival in Hampton, the previous inhabitants of our room left us their bed. Their hard, hard, unyielding bed. The bed that, had it been a person, would have been a combination of Thatcher and Howard. Hardened by hairspray, it never said sorry.

So last week they came and took it. And it knew. It knew they were coming for it. In those last few nights it became even worse to sleep on. Last Thursday I staggered into work and collapsed into my amazingly ergonomic office chair with complete relief while it worked it’s lumbar positioning magic. If it hadn’t been for the chair I still would have been stumbling, Worzel Gummidge style, stiff limbed and scaring more than birds.

Since Saturday we’ve been sleeping on alternating combinations of the foam mattress from the van and D & E’s old futon mattress. While M was away at my dad’s assisting him in challenging the longevity of his liver I tried a combination approach, but ended up feeling like I’d spent the night in an ever-deflating sponge cake. God.

Today, in my lunchbreak, I cruised Forty Winks and then Captain Snooze, prising my desperate body from $4000 beds after I noticed some of the staff looking askance at me after I began snoring. Just gently. I would love to be action-woman and solve this issue with a purchase at 9am tomorrow morning, however, we are off to the Maldon Folk Festival for a few days and are thus doomed to three more nights on old foamy (this time in the van).

We’ll be camping at Tarrengower Reserve.