The Science of Sleep

Listening to: El Pero Del Mar - El Pero Del Mar



Dialect Word of the day: Outwith (outside of)


I woke this morning unable to move my limbs.

My sleep addled mind instantly lept to the most logical conclusion: I'd had an horrific stroke and was incapable of movement below the neck. I sighed, accepted the cruel fate that had befallen me and drifted back into a blissful sleep. Given that I can spend all night worrying about the minutiae of my humdrum life, I think it's fair to say that I displayed hitherto unknown depths of stoicism.

When I awoke properly, some hours later I found that before leaving for work, Jess had lovingly tucked the quilt around me, but had done it with such vigor that I was swaddled like a big gormless Baby Jesus.

Having escaped from the jaws of lifelong paralysis, I decided to make the most of the day, finish the application for the Masters degree, clean the flat, do the recycling, cook something nice for tea and generally behave like a productive human being. Somehow my good intentions got blunted by a combination of the cold, apathy and the fact that the Archers omnibus was on the radio.

I really should loathe the Archers with a passion and spent many years doing exactly that. I used to spend all Sunday lunchtimes praying for a mass outbreak of BSE to hit Ambridge or for a communist coup to collectivise Brookfield farm, anything that would have seen the wretched show taken off the air. The Archers seems to exist in an alternative universe, the fictional county of Borsetshire is unaltered since feudal times, with the whole village being run in the interests of the insufferably smug Archer family. The working class characters, almost all forelock tugging yokel types, seem to exist only for casual labour and comic relief. However when I moved out of my parents' house, teatimes seemed strangely incomplete without it and the tyrannical silence my mother used to enforce from 7:03 to 7:14pm. I will try and keep all mention of The Archers to an absolute minimum, but they may well feature heavily in future blog entries.


After that I'm not quite sure what happened to the rest of the day. I cannot recall a single thing that happened until Jess came home, somewhat peeved to find me still in my dressing gown and the flat looking like a dosshouse. I tried to explain, to her that unemployment, robs the day of any purpose structure or meaning, so what she sees as hours of uninterrupted leisure is a sprawling mass of dead time. I know my degree in Sociology isn't worth much, but being able to trot out this sort of pseudo-academic psycho-babble, can come in useful. It certainly sounds a hell of a lot better than "I'm a shiftless, work shy, skiver."