So this whole “the world’s gonna end unless we do something now malarkey”, is it just me or is this yet another cash cow.

Let’s face it, Britain is leading the world in “climate change” goodness, with carbon neutral this, low emission that and what does any other country do (p.s the answer is very little if indeed anything).

So the earth is heating up, true but it has been doing so for hundreds of thousands of years, is it really going to help if your local council fine you for putting a piece of plastic into the wrong dustbin?

Air travel once the right of only the wealthy opened up to everyone by the likes of Freddy Laker and then RyanAir oh and that pathetic excuse for an airline (SleazyJet) will be made impossible when it becomes the norm to have a carbon tax levied on every flight. Now does this money go to save the world, I would suspect not, it will simply go into nice high interest accounts of the government, along with hikes in petrol prices (car is bad, repeat this mantra 12 times!) and every other piece of taxation this country slings at the long suffering people.

I can see a future and a not too distant one either, where everything is blamed on climate change (what’s that you say, this time is now) and your whole life will be ruled by your very own, personal and individual “carbon footprint” given to you by some hippy do-gooder from the council who has worked out that you burn 12 trillion tonnes of carbon by the time you have breakfast. My friends this future is bleak and uncompromising, but it won’t save the world, whatever we reduce our carbon emissions by, China and other countries increases it by several folds with new power stations.

Don’t be fooled by the Hype, Climate Change is inevitable, surely the years of airline travel, cars, power stations, bombs, wars and destruction on the planet has started an avalanche that won’t stop by placing your recyclables into the green bin!!

Now I promised myself I would not rant (sorry mum), but come on for goodness sake, save the world, but save it sensibly. Is there any point saving a world if the people can’t afford to live in it?

We have suffered for years with a double bed, two adults and a very needy cat (who manages to steal half the bed leaving us hanging of the edge).

Enough, we thought, time to buy ourselves a King sized bed, so off we go round the showrooms, spending the best part of an hour testing mattresses (jumping on them, rolling over them, bouncing up and down on them and generally making the staff worry what we were up to), then choosing a really nice bedstead, hurrah all set so we think.

The bed arrived on Valentines Day (yup gonna test drive this puppy), so off I set with spanners and screwdrivers in hand to build the “30 minute” bed following the simplest instructions. 3 hours later and it was built, but oh there is a slight problem, the inside metal frame is 1inch narrower than the bed frame, making it impossible to fit properly, that coupled with the fact that it is rusty doesn’t make for a good start. Undeterred I placed the 4 tonne Kingsize mattress on the bed to check it out and see of there were any other problems, oh boy!

It would appear that our Kingsize (standard size) mattress, is actually 6 inches shorter than our Kingsize (standard size) bed, leaving a massive and quite frankly dangerous gap. So off to the showroom I pop, tape measure in hand and low and behold their bed had the exact same gap, WHY? Now for those of you used to British Customer Service, you can guess the response:

“Ah sir (says the manager through gritted teeth, when what she means is stop bothering me), all Kingsize mattresses are that short, it allows you to tuck in your duvet covers, plus which a pocket sprung mattress will collapse over a few months and fill the gap”

Right, so all beds are made too long and all mattresses need 6 inches to tuck a duvet in, plus a “pocket sprung mattress” guaranteed for 10 years not to collaps or lose the shape, will collapse to fill a 6 inch gap in a period of months. I don’t think so!!!!

After scouring countless stores, it would appear that only this one company, with it’s own range of beds suffer this problem. My guess is that this a set of beds built by foreign labour with a knackered old tape measure and now they have  to “flog em off” as fast as they can to unsuspecting punters. Not us though, the bed is going back and we are getting our money back (good job really cos we went and bought a proper bed from a lovelly little pine warehouse).

And now, we have a little bit of bed each, but the cat still manages to steal most of it during the night (little git).

So Valentines Day was spent on our blow up airbed from camping, romantic or not.

P.S Don’t ever try carrying a Kingsize headboard and footboard in a Suzuki jeep, it just aint big enough, you scrape your knuckles on the corners and really struggle to drive properly.