You might not slumber quite so contentedly if your were aware that your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites, which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes of skin that you shed as you doze and toss. Your pillow alone may be home to forty thousand of them. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon.) And don’t think that a clean pillowcase will make a difference. To something on the scale of bed mites, the weave of the tightest human fabric looks like ship’s rigging. Indeed, if your pillow is six years old - which is apparently about the average age for a pillow - it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of ’sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung’, to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre. (But at least they are your mites. Think of what you snuggle up with each time you climb into a hotel bed.)
From Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything.’
Please spare a few seconds to satisfy my scientific curiosity. Cast your vote in the ‘How Old Is Your Pillow’ poll on my sidebar 
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Thanks a lot, Vijay! Does that mean I have to carry my very own more than 6 year old pillow with me every time I travel? What do they feed on if you go away for an extended period of time? Will they eventually die off and how long would it take?
At least I’ll never be lonely, although they’re not great conversationalists.
regards
jmb
PS how do I get one of those neat calendars, I clicked on it but didn’t go anywhere?
JMB, I hear the mother in you speak with so much concern about the ‘poor dears!!’
I don’t know if Blogger has an equivalent plug-in or widget. Actually I don’t recollect seeing a similar calendar - that links to posts on specific dates - on any of the Blogger blogs that I visit.
The ‘neat’ calendar is a widget for WordPress. It looks neater in this theme
Thank you very much Vijay. I read your blog after I set the bed for my little one, and now I am not sure if I should let her continue sleeping in her soft bed, or put her on the floor !!!!!!
But, the floor should contain stuff too, right?