Tag: sleeping

#oneaday, Day 138: Days in the Sun

It was another gloriously sunny day today. It’s easy to forget that England gets nice weather sometimes when an estimated 85% of our days are overcast.

Everyone is in a better mood in the sunshine. And, judging by the number of people in town, everyone skips work in the sunshine, too. I went to the park and sat in the sun for a bit and there were people from all walks of life all around. There was the chav in the open shirt who kept stroking his chest. There were the noisy, screechy girls. There were excited little kids on their half-term break headed for the playpark. And there was me.

Sitting in the sun is nice. There’s something extremely pleasant about the weather being good enough for you to be able to sit (or indeed lie) on the grass and just relax. If it’s been raining or snowing, or if it’s cold, you’d never even think about lying down on the ground and dozing for a bit. But as soon as it gets a little bit sunny? Everyone seems to come down with narcolepsy. Well, except those people playing frisbee.

Lying in the grass is one of those things that triggers memories, particularly of being very young. I can remember lying on the grass at primary school on hot sunny days. Sometimes my friends and I would just lie there. Other times we’d talk. Other times still we’d attempt to do those stupid moves from P.E. that no-one ever does in real life. And on one memorable occasion, a friend became convinced that by doing a shoulderstand and “squeezing a bit”, he could make himself fart at will. (He couldn’t.)

Besides school, other grassy memories are mostly picnic-related. I have oddly strong memories of visiting the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and sitting in the grass having a picnic as we watched the planes take off, land and do various pieces of death-defying aerobatics. Thinking about it, I don’t think we were actually sitting on the grass, more hanging around the car in deckchairs eating sandwiches. But sandwiches always taste better outside, as everyone well knows.

So it’s been a nice day. A very nice day in fact. Even the fact that I clearly got a bit burnt judging by the tingling on my ears right now (either that or someone’s talking about me) didn’t detract from the niceness of the day. So that’s good. Nice days are good. Nice days are much-needed. Nice days have been away for a long time, so it’s, well, nice to see them again.

Let’s hope this lovely summery weather continues for some time, and that we see more in the way of girls in tiny shorts and less in the way of shirtless bald chavs staggering through parks with cans of Tennents Extra clutched in their desperate sweaty gorilla-hands. And maybe some English people can get a proper tan instead of feeling the need to pointlessly slather themselves with orange paint.

#oneaday, Day 127: Good Morning, Sleepyhead

Pro-tip: Colouring in things with a mouse is a pain in the arse. Don't start it, because then you'll have to finish it.Good morning! Well, it’s nearly 2AM after all. That traditional blogging time, you know.

So I’ve been by myself for some time now after a long time having someone beside me almost constantly. And the thing that’s struck me the most is how one’s perception of time changes. Or maybe it’s not the perception of time, it’s the brain associating certain activities with certain memories and wanting to distance itself from them. Or, to simplify matters, it’s about the messed-up sleepytime routine of the lonely man.

Take going to bed. I’ve found it quite difficult to make myself go to bed at a reasonable hour. I never was particularly good at it at the best of times, but if the occasion demanded it, I could be in bed before midnight. Before 11PM, even. But now? Staying up late isn’t particularly unusual. This isn’t some attempt to take full advantage of my new-found and not-particularly-enjoyable freedom. It’s simply that going to bed means spending time alone in a dark room. Which, as anyone who has ever suffered through depression, stress, or any sort of crisis (all three of which I’m suffering right now) will tell you, is a sure-fire way to get one’s brain thinking about things you don’t really want to think about. So my body convinces itself that it’s not tired and doesn’t want to go to bed yet. So I don’t. Eventually I will collapse into bed and sleep, but it’s only once I really can’t go on any longer.

The side-effect to this is, of course, that it’s sometimes a bit difficult to wake up in the morning. But not only that. Having grown accustomed to waking up alongside someone else and having that presence there to spur you on to face the day, whatever it might entail, it’s a shock to the system to suddenly have to do all that yourself. I can wake up early, sure. But getting out of bed? More difficult. When it feels like there’s not much to get up for – and certainly no-one waiting for me to get up – it becomes easy to just lie there staring into space or worse, fall asleep again. This is, of course, enormously impractical and could probably be rectified by going to bed a bit earlier, but because of the aforementioned reasons, that’s difficult too. Vicious cycle, you see.

It’s not as if I don’t keep myself busy, though. If I stay up late, it’s not just to stare at a wall or sit there in floods of tears, though both of those have happened at least once recently. No, I find something to do. I find someone to chat to. I write something. I draw something. I play a game. I harass people on Twitter. Anything to avoid having to sit in that dark room trying to get to sleep, failing and hearing that little tap-tap-tap of the unpleasant thoughts come a-knockin’ on my brain. It’s a distraction, though, not a substitute.

So the moral of this story, then, is don’t be alone. It sucks.