Sleeping on Marshmallow

I have been careful to avoid bwo's ire when choosing blog subjects. I am having too much fun here in the UK and am afraid she may punish me by taking me back home to Israel before I am ready. Nevertheless, I feel it is necessary to risk telling the story of the marshmallow mattress (actually mattresses).  

When we moved into this house on Petersham Road, I had a single request of the landlady. Please get us reasonable beds and mattresses (the place came furnished). There is nothing worse than old saggy beds that are too soft and pokey. She kindly bought new beds for us, but let's just say these are not the Rolls Royce of sleep furniture. The mattress (possibly an Ikea special) was a little, how can I put it, one dimensional. Soft, then hard, with a touch of metal spring digging into your fleshy parts. Bwo was unhappy. So I approached the relo people and they agreed (on producing a doctor's letter re: bwo's back) to replace the mattress. Great, I thought, I could finally get a good night's sleep.

Alas this was not to be. Bwo decided that what we needed was a "memory foam" mattress topper, to go over the sub-standard mattress  She quickly ordered one off Amazon. It cost multiple hundreds of pounds, but she assured me this was exactly what we needed to solve our sleeping distress. The thing arrived in a huge box, weighing about 900 pounds. We dragged it upstairs, tried it on the bed. Oh dear! it was way too big. Seems the bed had shrunk from the time bwo measured. This heavy clumsy thing lay around on the spare bed for a few weeks while bwo thought of a solution to the size problem. Perhaps we could cut it to size, or buy a bigger bed. The answer was simple, she simply ordered another one, the right size this time. I then heard the dreaded words "no worries, I'll just return the other one". (Never happened, It sat on top of the dog's kennel for a few months, now it's hidden somewhere in this house, along with the dozens of other parcels waiting to be returned - but that's a story for another time).

So we now have this "luxury memory foam" topping for our mattress. It's like sleeping on marshmallows. Rolling over is exhausting. It's boiling (I even wake up bathed in sweat when it's zero degrees out). It's like sleeping in quicksand. I often find myself dreaming that I'm struggling to swim in a sea of thick custard. But bwo loves it, which is all that matters.