My best pregnancy buy, by a mile, is a big V-shaped body pillow. Well, it’s also just about my only pregnancy buy (apart from clothes and a couple of books) but never mind that.

The joints around my pelvis have gradually loosened and become more achy. Nothing too bad, really, just a bit uncomfortable. But about two weeks ago it suddenly got a lot worse, so I was spending a large part of each night twisting and turning, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt too much.

Then one night when Eric happened to be away, I finally achieved a reasonably comfortable sleeping position by arranging all the three pillows in our bed in a carefully shaped long mound. That was a relatively good night. But of course Eric was going to come home and want his pillows back, so I needed a more long-term solution.

Eric had reminded me a few days earlier that there are long body pillows I could try. I thought I’d simply buy one of these, but when I went to look for one on Ebay, the search brought up some more interesting results as well: huge V- and C-shaped pillows. They were three times as expensive as simple bolster pillows, but, well, they looked so funky that I just had to try one. I bought one straight away – anything to get a good night’s sleep! – and it was delivered two days later, just in time before Eric was to come home. There were some big eyes in the office when my parcel arrived!

That night I had my best and deepest sleep in weeks, maybe more than a month. The pillow keeps my hips in a good position and provides some support for the upper body and/or the back as well, depending on how I lie. The only downsides are that it takes up half the bed, and that changing sides (or rather, extracting myself from the pillow) is a bit of a project. But balanced against the comfort of sleeping in it, those are minor points.

If I had known that it would feel this good, I’d have bought one weeks earlier.