I do not have problems with sleep. I get into bed and close my eyes. End of.
However.
I bought us new pillows from QVC. I did this for several reasons. They (assorted) tell you you should not have the same bedding forever. Most of the weight of your pillows is dead dust mites and their faeces. Lovely. Also, several year old pillows that I have slept upon look no different but the OH’s pillows go a strange, museum worthy hue. You could use them to set dress a seventeenth century drama and no one would argue with you. And they go flat. You are supposed to sleep on one pillow, whereas, if I am having digestive troubles (ooh me troubles) I need three to begin with, even eating no later than eight. Then there are the sneezes of the OH, which last, as the Kinks were wont to warble: all day and all of the night.
Accordingly when eight pillows appeared in a bundle for a bargain price with anti allergy covers, I bought them.
I then went through the massive palaver to book a slot at the dump to throw the old ones away. As I’m sure you recall, the OH cannot do this as he has been banned from the dump. Such a help. After a mere quarter of an hour online filling in forms, the: Tickets! You’ve got Tickets! landed in my inbox and a simple twelve minutes later (because the computer and the printer are not friends yet, despite having been introduced frequently) I managed to print them. I placed them on the notice board together with proof of my address and my residency, because you just know the tendency of us council tax payers to drive twenty miles to a different dump for a lark, and I was ready.
I did not, of course get banned from the dump. I was greeted with waves and kindness, made a burly dumper with a paper parasol laugh and the folk at the charity shop banter for five minutes. Sweetness and light it was, I don’t know how the OH does it.
And so to bed with new pillows.
Two too deep, one too shallow and domed, so your head rolled off.
I did toss and turn. I cannot lie on the metal arm until later in the morning but had just fallen asleep when an urgent alarm woke me.
It was the alarm clock telling me it wanted new batteries.
So, domed, flat, domed, flat, one pillow folded and springing open, domed, flat, folded, chucked off.
Finally I dropped off literally and figuratively, only to be woken at three eighteen by what felt like a scratchy leaf falling on my forehead. Half asleep I grabbed it and hurled it away from me. I woke, put the light on and looked.
It was a dead fly. A large dead fly.
When does this ever happen? Is it an omen for something? Where is a spider when you need one? Why, given the size of the room in comparison to the size of my forehead, did it fall on me? Had it been sitting on the light, dead for a while before it succumbed to gravity?
I buried it in the bin, with neither service nor hymn and had, momentarily, returned to my slumber when woken by the insistent doorbell at five past seven.
Five past seven!
I sprinted downstairs, opened the inside door, raced to the kitchen, found the key, opened the outside door.
‘Yewer nammmi?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Yewer sewer nammmi?’
‘Um Laverick.’
It worries me to think that somewhere in the world a child believes that the pinnacle of ambition is to cross the channel in a dinghy and get a job waking people early in the morning delivering printer cartridges.
I would have gone back to bed but I’m awake now.
So I thought we could have a chat.
How do you sleep? If it’s OK don’t change a thing (voice of experience.)
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