I'll Slice My Own Bread Thanks.

I'm back after the little sojourn. It was one of the best, for many reasons and I'll be sure to tell you more in forthcoming posts.

One of the many highlights was my amazing discovery, although I suspect I'm not the first person to actually come across these things, which may well mean that it wasn't a discovery.

I'm one of the many who have always struggled to sleep on a plane. No matter what the seat, even on the rare occasions when I've travelled business class, good quality sleep has alluded me. And, with frequent trips to Sri Lanka and Singapore, I've done a few long haul flights so I wouldn't consider myself as one of the tourist types who can't sleep simply because they're sitting there with their eyes wide open and marvelling at the joys of flight, or free alcohol.

The only times I've slept well are on the couple of journeys when I've had three seats to myself. I've lied down and slept like a baby, not that babies ever sleep like that, but I'm just being poetic.

There I was, on my way out of Heathrow, wandering excitedly but aimlessly around the shops and doing that thing that we all do, contemplating spending money on stuff that I wouldn't even look once at normally. These chaps who own shops in the airports must be rolling it in. They've got a captive audience who are in a great and relaxed mood and probably have more money in their pockets than they usually do. As if that isn't enough they then charge about six times the high street price for most things anyway.

On a whim I browsed one of the stands in the luggage shop. You know those stands that rotate and hold a load of "travel" things. Portable irons that fold down to the size of a matchbox, slipper things that are made from old socks probably donated by poor people, plug converters that work in any country in the world and everything to do with luggage you can possibly think of.

I had a longish look at the item in question and contemplated buying one. In the past I've frowned upon this particular item, thinking that they were the sign of an old person or someone a little bit sad, who's just got a bit too much time to think about things. Well you know that I don't fit into those labels so I can only conclude that my past opinion was plain wrong. So I bought one, for the princely sum of about £3. At current exchange rates I believe that's about 300,000 of your good old Sri Lankan Rupees.

Yes my dear reader, I bought one of those inflatable pillow things. The type you see saddos pull out on a plane, then blow up and sleep on for hours on end. Which is exactly what happened to me.

These things are brilliant. In a matter of minutes I was transformed from an "No I can never sleep on planes either" type to a "I just get on the plane and sleep for the whole journey".

Take it from me, these inflatable pillows are so good that they should be made compulsory. If I owned an airline I'd give one away with every ticket sold.

I saw some people with proper beanbag pillow things but they're not the same, the hassle of packing these things away must be a serious negative. The inflatable ones fold down to the size of an Indian penis and they're far more comfortable on a long flight.

They're better than the best thing since sliced bread. From now on I'll be taking my new pillow everywhere even if it means slicing my own bread.