So let’s talk about getting older and having to deal with all those irritating aches and pains and damaged bits, shall we?

You’ll know it when it happens to you, because you’ll start making noises when you pick something up off the floor. Later on, when you go into a furniture showroom and look at the squishy sofas you’ll say ‘You must be joking!’ instead of ‘Wow, that looks comfy!’ And one day, you’ll begin to think that perhaps one of those swivel car seats don’t look quite so stupid after all. Next thing you know, you find yourself actually buying Things Designed for the Damaged Body.

Yes, yes. I have indeed reached that stage. And when, like me, you get there, and if, like me, you have a dodgy disc in your neck, or any kind of neck pain at all, you’ll find that a good pillow is essential. So let me help you out here. Those damn things labelled ‘cervical’ or ‘neck support’ or (horror of horrors!) ‘orthopaedic’ are usually, um, a pain in the neck. Literally. Memory foam is actually quite hard, shaped pillows are all very well if you stay in one position all night, which most of us don’t, and combination fillings shift and roll and never stay where they’re supposed to be for very long. So here I am looking for a supportive pillow with a soft-as-down filling because, having fibromyalgia as well as a damaged neck, I need softness or I ache and feel bruised.

I found my ideal pillow about five years ago. It’s a Mediflow water-base pillow and when you first buy it and fill it with water and lie down on it you think you’ve gone to heaven. It is sooo blissfully comfortable and the water chamber means that when you roll, it rolls with you. The Mediflow is a great pillow – there it is, in the picture above, belly up so you can see the water fill inlet. It’s truly great. I bow to it, the person who designed it and everyone involved in its manufacture. However .. .

Apart from the water chamber at the base, it’s just a nice quality polyester pillow and it goes flat.

It doesn’t help, I guess, that I take it with me in my suitcase wherever I go. Travelling to London or New York or LA, it gets rammed into my suitcase with my socks and tee shirts and my laptop and, well, let’s just say I mistreat it. It goes flat quicker than the average Mediflow pillow. So now I’m on my third Mediflow pillow and it seems to me that they go flat quicker each time and I’m thinking I need to find something else, something that will last a tad longer.

My Other Half keeps telling me, with ever-decreasing hopefulness, that what I really need is a genuine down pillow. And I keep reminding him, with increasing levels of frustration, that I am Allergic to Feathers. Even sleeping in a hotel room on a bed that’s had the down comforter removed for my convenience* as I walk in the door and complain that despite my request there are feathers on my bed can have me coughing and wheezing all night. Down pillow? I don’t think so.

I recently found a mention of a wool pillow on some random wander around the interweb, and I’m wondering if that would be a good choice. It says it is as soft as down, very springy and unsquishable, and that it can be machine washed and tumbled dry. The trouble is, of course, that a) yeah, right, they all say that, and b) yeah, right. They all say that. And c) these damn things are too expensive to just buy on spec and I’m running out of space for all the ‘not quite right’ pillows. My guests have a quite remarkable pillow choice when they come to stay.

So, what do you all do for a comfortable, supportive pillow? Anyone found anything good?

I wait with bated breath.

*For ‘removed for my convenience’ read ‘snatched violently off the bed, waved three times in the air, folded, punched and smacked down on top of the clean sheets before being replaced with something synthetic which has been stored in the same closet as all the feather stuff’.