I've always been a bit puzzled by people who travel on airplanes with their own pillow. Full-size bed pillow, that is. I haven't formed a view on those squishy u-shaped neck pillows yet, except that they are fun to squeeze in the shop.
I mean, I get the idea about not being at the mercy of a strange pillow at your point of destination. No one can sleep well on the possible lumpy, foreign pillow that will greet you at the other end. And if you have one of those souped-up pillows - latex, memory foam, 100% virgin goose down, buckwheat or pillow stuffed with the hair of past lovers - it's totally understandable that insomnia or excruciating neck pain will ensue if your pillow is absent.
And everyone likes to go on holiday, even pillows.
But inevitably the pillows I see being lugged around the airport check-ins are not the prima-donnas of the pillow world.
They're your basic Tontine, flat and old and sad-looking, and always swimming in a faded pillowcase displaying a geometric print from the '80s.
It's never an Egyptian Cotton 300 thread-count crisp white pillowcase (although I guess it wouldn't stay either crisp or white for long en route). It's never a unbelievably puffy down pillow, swollen with feathers.
And on yesterday's flight, not only did I see the normal examples of the travelling pillow, but the girl sitting opposite me on the flight had a decrepit body pillow - one of those long, bolster-like pillows - so old and manky that the filling pooled at the bottom, causing her to become wedged in the aisle she tried to disembark.
Of course, it could have also been the three bags and large stuffed unicorn that were hampering her efforts, but I like to think it was the pillow making its own protest at being dragged into service when all it wanted to do was go to that Pillow Heaven in the sky, where you can air your stuffing and no one will drool on you anymore.
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