It is a truth universally acknowledged that once you find a product that's any darn good on the British market, whoever's selling it inevitably will discontinue the product line and start replacing it with some other, inferior rubbish, as has happened with this Gosa Syren 'back-sleeper' pillow from Ikea; which is the most recent example I've encountered of this.

My pillow-using habits are admittedly, probably a little bit odd: from 1976 to around the mid-2007, I had been using the same foam-piece-filled pillow that I'd had since the age of six. I was never able to find anything quite like it in terms of comfort and texture, but by the time the entire thing finally and catastrophically disintegrated a year or two ago (by which time the bulk of the pillow, if those scaremongering newspaper articles are to be believed, would've consisted mainly dust-mites and nothing else) there was literally nothing left to salvage, and so I was forced to find something else to sleep on at night.

After much searching, which included visits to designated bed-shops where you could expect to pay upwards of £70 for a single pillow and it was STILL no good, I selected a cotton-covered, duck feather and down-filled pillow from Ikea (which had one of those unfortunate Ikea brand names: 'Gosa Raps') as a replacement for the old pillow. At £15 odd, it wasn't terribly cheap but considering the state of the rest of the pillow market, not too bad value overall. It was extremely soft and lovely to lie on and could be adequately - wonderfully in fact - fluffed up back into shape. I quickly bought another as a back-up for when I have to be away from home, but when I went back to the shop last month to buy another of them for my daughter's bedroom, I found that Ikea has discontinued all of its feather-filled pillows; which means that now you can only buy synthetic or foam-filled ones there.

The replacement for the excellent Gosa Raps pillow is this crappy Gosa Syren one, which costs about the same as the old one (£15) but which is foam filled, and has the same rubbish textural and sleeping qualities of something you'd expect to get in a two-pack of cheap economy pillows from Asda that only cost a quid. Having purchased a number of cheap synthetic-filled pillows in the past (during pillow-emergencies such as when we've had unexpected guests round, etc.) I can confirm that despite its nice fine-weave cotton cover, its well-made, securely double-stitch-hemmed appearance, and its £15 price tag, to sleep on, the Gosa Syren pillow is EXACTLY like one of those cheap synthetic pillows you get in a discount shops.

It flattens out of shape so there's a big dent where you've put your head on it and it can't be reformed back to the original plumpness. It's a piece of utterly overpriced rubbish.

Shockingly, Ikea still do sell their previous range of feather-filled pillows - you can, for example, get them in Ikea shops in the States and elsewhere - but I'm told that they aren't sold in Britain any more. The reason for this I have been quite unable to ascertain, although I have enquired about it in the Bristol branch, and via an emailed question I submitted to the Ikea website.

I can only conclude from this that it is Ikea's policy to deliberately promote lower-quality goods at high prices on the British market, which - if it is what they're doing - I think is appalling business practice. If there is a health and safety problem with the old feather-filled pillows, I think that people who own these items already should be informed - especially if they make enquiries to Ikea as I have done myself.

The new Ikea Gosa range of pillows, if this one is anything representative of it and to put it in a nutshell, sucks.