Ralph Oswick: Still dreaming of a good night’s sleep
Idon’t think I’ve ever had a decent night’s sleep. Not your full eight hours anyway. Until now that is.
Until I was thirteen, I shared a bedroom with my parents. This was bad enough but what with my dad being a horticultural worker we weren’t very well off and I didn’t actually have a bed!
What I had was a pine table with its legs sawn off, covered with a thin eiderdown. Soft and yielding it was not.
I realise this sounds like a sketch from the Secret Policeman’s Ball (‘We lived in a cardboard box in the middle of the road!’) but no wonder I now suffer from bad hips!
When I finally graduated to a real bed, it was inherited from my livein granny when she passed away.
This huge piece of furniture had the appearance of a lunar landscape of boinging springs around which one had to convolute one’s body in order to find a flat bit.
Eventually my mum did buy me a comfy single divan on the nevernever but by then I had no idea how to get to sleep.
Nowadays I lie in state on a topof-the-range memory foam mattress placed on a magnificent brass bedstead. The best money can buy, literally with knobs on.
I have breathable pillows, an ergonomic neck support and fine Egyptian cotton sheets, freshly laundered and fragrant. Can I get to sleep? Can I heck. I’ve tried Radio 3. Must they play The Ride of the Valkyries or a selection from Borodin’s most animated operas at four in the morning?
The searing dissonance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring fails to induce a smooth journey into the Land of Nod.
The World Service can provide a hypnotic drone of voices, but then suddenly one becomes involved.
The state of the roads in Pakistan or the price of quinoa in Quito puts one on alert and the possibility of sleep is replaced by sudden interest in obscure foreign affairs.
I’ve tried not drinking coffee six hours before bedtime. And conversely guzzling buckets of the stuff on retiring. I’ve tried sleep apnea masks which although initially effective eventually bring on nasal frostbite. I’ve tried expensive herbal sprays.
The stupid thing is, just five minutes into Tipping Point of an afternoon and I’m in a deep coma.
But lying on my million-pound sleep machine I’m counting sheep till the cows come home!
However, I just might have found the solution. Audio books. Or more specifically, Swallows and Amazons in audio form.
These precocious children, Roger, Peggy, Nancy, Titty et al, erstwhile heroes of my formative years, now sound rather annoying with their constant prattle about pemican, gunwales, coots and cocoa.
Susan fussing over lists of provisions and boiling kettles, gruff Captain Flint and the world’s most liberal hands-off parents.
What I used to find edge of the seat adventure-by-proxy has transformed into a wash of 1930s nostalgia, guaranteed, if last night is anything to go by, to waft me (via my wood-paneled Hoseason’s Norfolk Broads cabin cruiser) into the welcoming arms of Morpheus.