Sarah and I have been sleeping on the bedroom floor on top of two, reasonably priced camping mats.

If we sleep at all, we wake up aching.

And this has been happening for two weeks now.

Every day, Sarah trawls ‘DBA’, which is a kind of Danish eBay - both for a mattress and a sofa, which we also lack.

(Apart from three cheap IKEA chairs around the dining table, we all watch TV sitting on a bean bag made for a dog - complete with a white graphic of a bone on the side of it.)

Finally, we found a memory foam mattress which was very reasonably priced and ten minutes walk away.

The Danes tend not to use spring mattresses like the Brits.

The norm is a box mattress with a topper about five or six millimetres thick.

When we bought our bed, it came with IKEA slats.

Continuing to use these would feel like sleeping on a fence, so we decided to buy the memory foam mattress on DBA and then make a plywood tray to put the mattress on temporarily.

Getting wood cut and having retired the car meant a bus ride out of town to Jem & Fix.

Or Jim’ll Fix It as we call it. A DIY store.

So, we packed away breakfast and headed off on the number 18 bus to Ega, where the store is based.

About two kilometres before our final destination, the bus turned left and took what we believed to be a detour.

It continued inland for about thirty minutes, all the time getting further away from the sea, where Ega is situated.

We stuck with it, thinking it was just a variation on the usual route.

Then another fifteen minutes later, we pulled into a village called Mejlby, whereupon the driver stopped the engine and got off the bus.

He was lovely and when we told him we’d caught the wrong bus, he smiled and said that was alright as he was turning it into a number 12, which would go through Ega on the way back into town.

In twenty minutes.

Ten minutes into the wait, I popped to a local shop to buy us some lunch but a problem getting a sandwich out of a glass case led to me nearly missing the bus and having to sprint to get on it - potentially having missed Sarah and Daisy, who didn’t know where I’d gone.

After an eternity, a trip through rolling Danish fields complete with horses and tractors, we arrived in Ega. But the wrong side of it. With time not on our side because we’d told the guy selling us the mattress we’d be back by 1600.

Since the DIY shed was a ten or fifteen minute walk away, we decided to shelve the plans and caught the bus home.

As we opened the door to the apartment, we got a text asking us to go to see the mattress at 1715.

Meaning that we could have bought the wood.

Then, half and hour later, we get another text which told us that he was sorry but the mattress had already been sold by his girlfriend.

So, basically, we’d wasted an entire day on a bus preparing for a mattress we weren’t able to buy.

Sleeping on the garden fence was no longer an option. We were doubly in need of a good night’s sleep now after all we’d been through.

So, after much discussion, we decided to drive to IKEA, where we bought a new memory foam topper.

This made a huge difference.

It’s like sleeping on a wooden floor instead of a marble one.