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Ted asks: Please explain “bed of roses” as in: “Life as a foreign student here is not a bed of roses.” My comments: Close your eyes and visualize a bed, king/queen-sized if you please, fully covered with rose petals. Now, imagine the same bed, this time, full of twigs and thorns. Naturally you prefer hanging onto that bed of roses. That picture is, well, a rosy picture, one that exudes peace, ease, comfort and, of course, happiness. And when the foreign student says that life is not a bed of roses, he means to say that life here is not all smooth and easy, but with struggles and hardships – what with the language barrier, different food and culture shock in general. Bon Jovi, I recall, sang a song of the same title (Bed of Roses) back in the 1990s in which he sings instead of a “bed of roses”, he sleeps in a “bed of nails”: I want to lay you down in a bed of roses For tonight I sleep on a bed of nails I want to be just as close as the Holy Ghost is And lay you down on a bed of roses Bed of roses the phrase, by the way, was coined in the 16th century by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of William Shakespeare. In the poem Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Marlowe wrote: And I will make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle | 
