Victory at last I might have to run out and buy a bottle of Veuve to celebrate. After weeks of sleeping sideways across a collapsed king-size mattress (and weeks of calls to Sleep Country Canada), our replacement is finally expected to arrive this morning.
Have you ever slept sideways? I don't advise it, as the pillows keep flying off the bed. But this was the only way we could think of to avoid waking up bent over like Methuselah after the one-sided pillow top we bought in August developed two cavernous moulds for us to lie in (Why buy a mattress anywhere else? Because customer service might call you back.)
The other day, griping over post-yoga coffee, I was amazed to discover that two of my friends had the same problem. One's brand-new pillow top had so dramatically subsided that she and her husband flipped it over and were sleeping, incorrectly, on its flat underside; the other was seriously contemplating taking out a pair of shears and clipping the pillow top right off. It is extremely annoying, we all agreed, to be sleeping on mattresses that are so ridiculously engulfing, you almost need ropes and piétons to climb out of them every morning. And then, catching ourselves, we all burst out laughing. Surely, insofar as the difficulties of human existence go, too-plush beds qualify as what is known as a "champagne problem."
As oxymoronic as they sound, champagne problems are the difficulties we like to invent when we are fortunate enough not to have any real ones. Like the effervescent liquor from whence they get their name, they are the frivolous froth with which we distract ourselves from the intractable anxieties of everyday anxieties. A blissful tonic against the strain of ill parents, our children's difficulties, grinding worries over work, money and marriages - they are, in short, the cherry atop the parfait of what we must admit, in a global sense, is a champagne lifestyle.
Sorry, but your home renovation that is over budget and taking forever? It may indeed be trying, but it's a champagne problem. And your kids with their perfect teeth and perfect SAT scores who still didn't get into their first choice of Princeton or Harvard? This may be a great disappointment, but we're still in the champagne region. Not sure how to fit in a family ski vacation next winter when you're already booked to go hiking in the Himalayas, or whether it's greener to lease a new Prius or keep driving your old Smart car? Same story. And as nice as it would have been for your daughter to have made Head Girl, your spouse to have made partner and your three-year-old to have made it into the morning class at Montessori, these small setbacks must be seen for what they really are (i.e., issues best served cool and bubbling in a flute), lest the gods find you unappreciative and demote you to mere sparkling-wine territory.
What's really funny about all this, is that while the usage of the word "champagne" has expanded to become an all-purpose VIP, top-drawer, Waldorf salad type descriptive (think "champagne" blondes, budgets, tastes - even the champagne-dubbed hue now de rigueur in luxury cars and condos), the latest news is champagne itself is expanding.
Since the Middle Ages, when Pope Urban II (a Champenois) declared the wines of his native region the world's best, champagne has enjoyed elite status as the quaff of kings, the mead of moguls. Carefully honed over the centuries by the French (the inventors, after all, of the notion of cachet), this prestige was codified into law in 1927 with an appellation d'origine contrôlée designation, which determined that no wine could be called a champagne if it was not actually grown and produced within the historic and strictly defined 33,500-hectare champagne region (under U.S. law, California producers such as Korbel can call their sparkling wine "champagne," while the Spaniards are stuck with cava).
The only problem with this marketing strategy is that it has been too successful: Thanks to all the newly minted billionaires, worldwide demand for bubbly has been rising steadily over the past two decades and, until this latest market fizzle, has shown few signs of flattening (in 2007, we popped a record number of corks off a whopping 338.7 million bottles). Hence the eminently practical suggestion proposed on March 14 to expand the champagne region by adding 40 new neighbouring, wine-producing villages to keep up with demand.
Leave it to the French to find a champagne solution to what is clearly a champagne problem.
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