Bed Trip

I'm sorry I've not been in touch. Things have been hard. I can't bear your worrying so it is high time I updated you.

You might be surprised to hear that I've been travelling.

A few months ago my bed upgraded itself. It did this without warning and did it by stealth. Rather like the ninja Windows 10 upgrade that befell many of you last year.

It was always a good bed, a kingsize sleigh bed. For a year it has had two mattresses. Evelyn gave me a memory foam mattress which I chucked on top of the other one while deciding whether I preferred the new one. They're both still there.

Post-upgrade my bed is even better, for now it can fly. It melts through the ceiling and flies wherever I want. Only at night though. It is undetectable by human eye or radar.

I know what you're thinking! Health and Safety, right? I was the same when I first found out. I assumed some sort of harness would be necessary for safe travel at high altitudes. I had to overcome my fear and trust in the sophisticated self-levelling mechanism. The bed never goes out of the horizontal. Ask yourself, when did you ever fall out of bed while sleeping with a small dog in a perfectly horizontal king-size bed? If the answer is "One or more times" please  avoid this technology.

Climate is an important point of the night-flight experience, so the bed is supplied with a miraculous duvet that maintains a pleasant temperature in ambient conditions between -100c to 100c. I don't know what happens if it rains. Fingers crossed it stays dry.

It is steered and powered purely by thought. It therefore rates A+ on the eco scale.

Where would you go, with such a bed? I bet your first trip would be to somewhere really good. I went to Jamaica.

Well it was OK. It was nice seeing the occasional ship in the ocean but there weren't that many and the flight time was long. When I got there the beach was lovely, but I felt like a tourist. I think I missed the point of the flying bed.

Pretty much every trip is in Southern  England now. Often I rise in a graceful arc above Reading and head south-west. I need to get far enough away to find the proper darkness. We're looking at Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset here.

When I arrive at the proper darkness the bed stops and hovers. Above me are so many stars that the sky looks 3D. After a few years in the  Reading townglow it is mind-blowing. Then I roll over onto my front and look over the edge of my mattresses. In the countryside, there are stars down below as well, made from lights left on in farms,

There are black shapes too, hills and church spires and trees.

There has to be a smell of wood-smoke. A collie dog should do one bark and get an answering Baaa.

When I've had enough of that I will find a little town. Always a different little  town but it doesn't matter, they're all similar. It is very late now and all the locals are in bed so I might go for a cheeky joyride round the streets.

Here we go. Past the Co-op, the charity shop,the estate agents, the tweely named coffee shop, the hairdressers and the big white pub with the pavement narrowing outside it.

[This isn't finished. I have to stop because of the pain. Will finish later if I can. Will post anyway so you know I am still alive]