The unravelled sleep of care

After 18 years of faithful service, the scratcher is literally on its last legs and the time has come to buy a new one. When I rented the house out, the bed was slept in by a cast of thousands. Among those who have slumbered in it were two Irish girls who shared it – not at the same time but at different hours of the day and night. When one knocked off her bar job she would come home and prise her friend out of the cot to take her place. The other would rise and go to her shift and do the same when she got home. And so the hot bedding went on, with the outrigger couch allocated for the entertainment of gentleman callers.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I think of those girls and the roll call of people who have slept in this bed, and let me tell you it doesn’t help with the kip. It was all right when I was youthful and sleeping on secondhand beds so saggy a hammock would have seemed straighter.

But now that I have more rings round the trunk, said trunk has to be catered to and I am dragging the weary carcass to various bed shops to assume the horizontal position as I try out the shop floor merchandise.

After hours of lying flat on the back and looking up the nostrils of sales personnel hovering over me delivering spiel, I am none the wiser and more confused about what sort of bed I should purchase.

This confusion only adds to my list of things to worry about in bed during the wretched insomniastricken nights. On Thursday night I worried, hour after sleepless hour, about the rare whale in Wellington Harbour, fretting that the planned Sky Show fireworks would go ahead so the wonderful creature could cavort no more.

I am in total agreement with the character Patrick Melrose (in the brilliant series of the same name currently screening on SoHo) when he said that fireworks were meant only for little children. And what about the rest of the fish in the harbour – they don’t need the juvenile pyrotechnics either.

When the tossing and turning gets too much and one starts neurotically counting the hours of sleep deprivation (which only makes it worse), I rise and do housework, hoping that the vacuuming doesn’t wake the neighbours.

You would think that even the threat of dreary household chores would send you deep into the arms of Morpheus but, no, we are still awake debating which foetal position side is best to sleep on, and small matters such as – will that arm lying outside the sheet become so cold it will snap off like a piece of porcelain?

Perhaps one should hire an Uber and be driven round till sleep hits and a brace of butlers could carry the slumbering corpse into the house and be put to bed like a small child?

Instead of beds, maybe we need sleep chambers as used by astronauts travelling to far-flung planets. They slumber for years on end, all bodily needs taken care of, with no interruption of sleep, bar an alien or two popping out of a stomach.

But there is help at hand in the form of herbal teas, which with this insomniac has a success rate of about 3 out of 10 cups. Unfortunately, the last time I tried this remedy I fumbled for the wrong tea bag, slugged back a bowel cleansing infusion and went back to bed.

To my horror, the stomach started rumbling and making strangulated noises only whale linguists could interpret. Note to self, for those bog cold long nights’ journey into days apres an Alpine tea – get a wooden toilet seat.