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October 16, 2005
‘You’ll feel better tomorrow, come the morning light now baby…’
Sometimes I sleep normally, the rest of the time I flit between the two extremes of acute insomnia and simply not being able to keep my eyes open. Last night I managed both in one night.
I passed out on my Mum’s sofa for about twenty minutes after she had already gone to bed. So I yanked myself up, picked my book off the floor and got into bed, I think it was picking the book up that did it because then I faced up to the fact that I’m not going to get The Woman in White re-read by Tuesday, I’m not going to finish watching Middlemarch either (I brought the videos here but would you believe it, the video player is broken) and there is still a bag load of theory I just don’t remember. In short I shouldn’t have come, not this weekend.
We are also supposed to be going to see New Model Army in Cambridge tonight, which we had booked for months, long before I knew when my exam was and I wouldn’t miss them for the world but perhaps I should.
If my anxiety had stayed with the upcoming exam then I guess that would be understandable in the circumstances but no, not I. Somewhere round about 2am things started getting irrationaly surreal. Littleone scratched her head once and so I was convinced that she had head lice, not pin prick sized ones but enormous mutant critters that were crawling across the pillow ready to gnaw into my scalp and pick at my brain. A pile of clothes in the corner looked remarkably like a chicken, a chicken with bird flu, which meant that I couldn’t get out of bed and rearrange the clothes so they didn’t look like a chicken anymore because then I would be touching the thing and I’d be sure to catch the disease.
When I’m at home and I can’t sleep then I get up and pace the floor, do some reading or surf the internet but in somebody else’s house it is different. Any slight movement would be sure to wake my Mum who would want a long and detailed account of why I can’t sleep. If I told her it was just exam nerves she would be convinced it was something much worse that I wasn’t telling her about. If I mentioned the infectious clothes chicken and the mutant head lice then she’d be sure to have me sectioned and possibly straight jacketed which would really screw me exam wise (how would I hold the pen?) and so I just lay there still as possible (sharing a bed with my daughter I couldn’t even allow myself the pleasure of tossing and turning) trying to remind myself that I’d be laughing about it all in the morning which consequently put the lyrics to ‘Don’t Cry’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses in my head, which just happened to be the theme tune to my sixth form at school. The absolutely last thing I needed to see was the chicken and the head lice playing air guitar to Guns ‘n’ freakin’ Roses.
Eventually sleep and I met in a giant head on collision which resulted in the most disturbing nightmares. I was back at school again and it was about to be parents’ evening and my sociology teacher was threatening to tell my Mum about the time we were on a trip to one of those lecture conference things in London and my friends and I sneaked out of the auditorium and went CD shopping instead. (At the time I got away with it because my friends were in the Upper Sixth and she was convinced it was them who had lead me astray when really it was just as much my idea as anyone else’s)
Am I laughing about it in the morning light? Well no not yet but I thought you probably would…
Posted by purple elephant at October 16, 2005 10:26 AM