JET LAGGED

Ah, my sleep patterns have been all over the place over recent weeks. Granted, this came out of being fortunate enough to have been on holiday in a place in a significantly different time zone, so it’s hardly something to complain about, but nevertheless it’s been playing some pretty sneaky tricks on this old body and its strange little habits, I can tell you.

It began, as these things do, with my general insomnia managing to transport itself across the sea and find me still waking up at generally the same wee small hour as I do at home, albeit “time-shifted” by eight hours. This continued throughout the holiday with a gradual shift towards what you might call “normalcy” if you really wanted to, although I don’t really hold with such verbal shenanigans.

Then the flight home threw me a curve ball. I watched a couple of movies whilst the rest of the cabin was put into darkness, and as “J. Edgar” finished, I decided that I would have a nap myself only for the cabin lights to be immediately turned on and a light breakfast to be served and for us to be hurtling homewards on final approach without me having had so much as a blink of sleep and facing the prospect of having to turn around my driving technique back to what I would call “normality” after two weeks of doing the opposite Stateside.

Once safely home (phew!), the beloved dozed off pretty immediately and slept for 24 hours. I, rather (un)naturally, stayed awake, mostly doing some photo-wrangling until about 2pm where I sloped off up that wooden hill and actually managed about 2 hours sleep before waking up again. Happily, I staggered off to Bedfordshire once again a couple of hours after that and slept more-or-less through for sixteen hours, which is, as some of you may know from my previous musings on insomnia, rather unprecedented.

I now thought that happily I was back on schedule, but no. Sunday night brought little sleep, and Monday night, despite almost crippling (and frankly quite dangerous) fatigue that had overtaken me after being at work all day following that, was still very poor in the acquisition of the required quantities of winks.

Tuesday night was far more successful. In fact it was so good that I had to be woken by the alarm for the first time in years, which came as something of a shock to the system (and the morning routine), I can assure you. Nevertheless, ever since then, which, I’ll grant you isn’t really all that many days, I’ve been sleeping right through until about 5.30AM which might still sound like a kind of insomnia to many of you, but is actually rather unheard of at Blogfordshire H.Q. and might, at the very least, be symptomatic of proving that the holiday did indeed manage to relax me in some small way.

I’m sure that it won’t last...

What has really suffered, of course, is being able to find those little moments that I used to use to write my nonsense in. Those “wee small hours” which I used to spend concocting nonsense like this are suddenly spent slumbering away like some sort of “normal” human being, whatever that might turn out to be, and my tiny sparks of “creativity” seems to have been largely snuffed out. I also find that the “post-holiday malaise” has rather made me less inclined towards the process of writing anyway. Somehow, “broadening the mind” has made it feel a less “vital” pastime than once it was.

However, I do sometimes find myself still thinking about things, albeit in a slightly less “thorough” way than I might once have done. For example, I always find it very strange when I think about things like time zones anyway, so there is nothing really unusual in that, I just might not have thought it worthy of much comment in the past, that’s all. All that life going on just as it does every day whilst the likes of us sleep or have already finished our working day. Just as the day was getting started “over there” I had to make a strange mental adjustment to accept that m’colleagues would be packing up to go home over here. Then, when you start to think about our Antipodean friends, the whole mind-bending process goes into another loop-the-loop. Their day is done before ours has even begun and the Americans are so far behind them that they almost meet them getting up the next morning.

That’s just the kind of thinking that’s likely to keep me awake at nights...