Black sabbath

Sunday's an odd day, isn't it?  You have a day off, unless you're a priest or a work in Homebase that is, but it's not one of unalloyed joy and carefree jollies, is it?  No, there's always the spectre of Monday looming ever larger on the horizon to spoil matters.

I've always hated Sundays.  My earliest memories of this day of alleged rest are of recurring nightmares.  I used to dream I was having an out-of-body experience in the assembly hall of my school.  My...well, spirit, I suppose, would float around for a bit and then shoot up a corner of the rafters and just sit there.  At this point I'd be overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety and wake up in a panic.  I was five years-old.  

Although these nightmares don't sound scary per se (You'd certainly have your work cut out trying to pitch a film treatment of one), I used to dread them.  They were relentless in their regularity.  Looking back now it's rather sad that a child as young as this should have been beset by nightmares.  The upshot of all this is that I developed a phobia about Sunday.  Actually, it's Monday that prompts the real fear, but Sunday is his sinister hand-maiden.  She pretends to be benign, but would betray you at the drop of a fez.

I thought for years that I had an especial and irrational hatred of Sunday, but talking to most seemingly normal adults, it turns out to be a very common malady.  This does rather beg the question what the fcuk are we doing with our lives.  If we all find life by turns boring, dreadful and workaday, then what's the point of continuing?  We should all resign en bloc an take up tightrope walking, or whatever perverted pastime we feel might afford us some fulfilment.

Your eyelids have reached critical mass

I had another night of broken sleep last night.  This one was particularly unwelcome as it abutted one of the same on Monday night.  Two days and approximately one hundred minutes' sleep make for an incendiary combination.  It certainly doesn't aid office-based bonhomie.  Anyone who looks twice at me today can expect a head lock for his (or her) trouble.

Shit sleep tends with me to come in intense bursts like this.  I think the whole thing was triggered by a piece I happened across on Chris Evans' Radio2 programme on Monday afternoon.  He had a self-proclaimed sleep expert on.  

Sleep experts suffer from the same delusion as economists: if they really did know how to fix things (the economy, insomnia etc.), the problems they address would very quickly cease to exist.  Now despite their claims, I still see plenty in the papers that suggests to me that economists can't control or predict the economic cycle with any more accuracy than a macaque with a tombola.  Ditto sleep experts.  If your treatments worked, insomnia would disappear from the surface of the planet overnight (pun intended).  People aren't thick.  They aren't sticking with insomnia because they fear change, or because they wrongly think it makes them attractive to the opposite sex.

One of the reasons cures for insomnia don't work (in the long term at any rate) is because they draw attention to the act of sleeping.  This is what triggered my current bout.  As soon as I heard this chap on the radio holding forth about the importance of down pillows and flame-proof jimjams and so on, I knew I would struggle to sleep that night.  

When one becomes self-conscious about dropping off, the game's up.  It's like if someone asked to think carefully about all the actions you make whilst driving to Sainsburys of a Saturday morning.  Your car would end up on its roof in a lay by before you got 200 yards.  Sleep systems, therefore, are doomed to failure.  Musicians know all about this; they refer to it as keeping out of your own way.  I suppose it's akin to "the zone" that athletes rattle on about.  Basically, you have to stop thinking about what you're doing.

The only upside to insomnia is that it makes you realise how well you can function with scant shut-eye.  This is quite empowering.  I'm convinced that could I sleep as well as my wife (she could get eight solid hours of dreamless inside a tumble dryer if she had to), I would be running the free world.  Imagine for a moment what a pleasure for everyone that would be.

Jet lag, night sweats and Abednego

I slept fitfully last night, and I lay the blame at the foot of the British Summer Time.  The clocks popped forward to the tune of one hour on Sunday morning, and my body clock has been all to cock since.

When I lay down my weary noggin last night, the old BC looked askance at me and said "It's a bit early, isn't it?"  As far as he was concerned of course it was twenty to eleven, not twenty to midnight.  My body clock, for reasons I don't fully understand, as well as keeping time, has charge of the thermostat.  When I drag him to bed early, he reaps his revenge by turning the heat up until it's impossible to drop off.

So I spent the next 3 or 4 hours sweating, scratching and getting zero nutritional value from my daily rest.  Sleep gurus (you know the sort -  impossibly optimistic life-coaches with no actual friends, only acquaintances who assuage their justified feelings of inadequacy by writing books with titles like "Grin your blubber-free in two weeks") suggest that in situations like this one should get up and creosote the budgie or something.  To which I respectfully say "bollocks".  I won't give in that easily.  Is that what made Britain great?  I shall dig my heels in and may the best man win.

So, anyway, I was catatonic this morning.

In other news, I'm a massive Vivian Stanshall fan.  Yes, he was mental, but in a endearing and very rational way.  Allow me to explain.  Vivian was a precocious child and very quickly realised that that the society he had been born into was at best dull and at worst an asylum run by its inmates.  Anyone who even for a moment take bourgeois mores seriously is not possessed of a rational mind.  

It doesn't matter which particular metaphysic you hang your hat on either.  If you're religious, why would you care about anything on a material plane?  Money, position, the respect of one's peers: they mean nothing.  And if you hold that the universe has no prime mover, and that life is merely a happy confluence of accident and chemical potential, why would you give a shite about the size of your back garden?  You have, by chance, been deposited into a sentient form, and are clinging to the surface of a small planet for what is after all merely a cosmic heartbeat.  You might as well enjoy yourself.  God knows, it'll be over soon enough (no pun intended, Your Highness.)

So, anyways, it turns out that Vivian spent the first 10 years of his remarkable life in a house about 400 yards from my own.  How could I not have know this?  The council in my borough, a shameless and incompetent cabal of vaguely left-wing small businessmen on the make, haven't put a plaque up or thought to mention the fact in their abundant literature.  What an outrageous oversight.

If we took a holiday...ooh yeah, ooh yeah

I'm just back from a long weekend in Ireland, visiting my parents. I always sleep like a new born when I'm there. It's difficult to pin the very welcome blame for this on one cause; it's probably a combination of events: the clean air, the peace, the restful ambiance, the good food and the heavy consumption of Guinness. Each plays its part I suppose.

The odd thing is though as soon I step back onto English soil I'm unable to slumber, which makes no sense. Take last night for example. I spent the majority of the day in Ireland, so I had a plenty of exposure to clean air. I ate well, and because of the travelling, I arrived home in a fatigued state. The wife and I then popped out for a couple of sharpeners before dinner to bring the curtain down on the festivities. But could I sleep last night? Could I feck. The only conclusion I can come to, therefore, is that I'm allergic to England. It could be London I suppose. But I'd need a control group to be certain. Perhaps I should relocate to Leicester for six months? That's a high price to pay for catastrophic fatigue though; I think I'll just make do and mend.