SLEEPY*

I get so sleepy at this time of year. Not sleepy enough to sleep, of course, but too sleepy to function properly. I shuffle about like a zombie, somehow managing to focus long enough to get my work done, and then find myself yawning uncontrollably through another evening, failing to concentrate on anything very much or with a great deal of enthusiasm, and then stagger up to bed at a time which the average toddler might consider unfashionably early.

It could be the excess of daylight at this time of year that causes this crippling, all-pervading sense of fatigue. I always regret not having taken full advantage of the light, bright evenings when the darkness starts to fall again, but when it’s here, it always seems to be raining, or there’s some other, probably much more mundane and ultimately unnecessary thing that needs to be done, and so, whenever I think about just going outside to sit on the bench and just watching the sun set, somehow I don’t quite manage to get around to actually doing it.

A couple of weeks ago, later on in the evening than is usual, I had to drive to the station to meet a train and I passed a couple of pubs on the way. It was a lovely, bright summer’s evening, and I had quite the nostalgic pang for just sitting outside in the warm evening sunlight with a pint of some golden drink, a hand-pulled bitter maybe, or possibly even a refreshing dry cider, and I enviously drove past, continuing on with my journey, my tastebuds all a-tingle. A few minutes later, I was sitting with the car parked in a less-than-beautiful tarmacced car park with a suitably summery station tuned in on the radio, and feeling positively thirsty. The train duly rolled in, I met my passenger and we headed home discussing our respective days. Ten minutes or so later we were home, and through the door we went, suddenly both too exhausted to do much but slump down in front of the TV with a nice cup of tea and a meal knocked together with the least possible effort. All thoughts of summer pubs were consigned to oblivion and even the few bottles and cans that could have called so temptingly from the fridge were all but forgotten in the ensuing torpor.

I really was so very sleepy over one recent weekend that most of those precious, uncommitted hours just seemed to vanish away to nothing, and Monday just came and leapt horrifically into being with an almost unseemly haste. I had been experiencing that particular kind of sleepy that comes after a long week of working days and the anxieties that inevitably come along with them, and the equally long sleepless nights between them that found me getting up and scribbling electronic nonsense for the world to feel indifferent towards at the kind of ridiculous hours of the night when all the sane people would be happily dreaming their dreams.

One of the problems with feeling excessively sleepy is that, whilst you walk around in the daytimes in a strangely surly haze, at night the brain can be screaming so loudly at you, imploring you to get some rest, that it wakes you up. Then, when you have convinced yourself that you’re never going to manage to get a moment of proper restfulness ever again, you tend to doze off at strange moments, sometimes whilst you are lying on the couch with the TV on. At the weekend this means that you are exposed to small chunks of the kind of feature films that fill up airtime on a weekend afternoon and which can bleed into your subconscious thoughts as you drift off into your own bizarre inner worlds, and can spin into all kinds of unusual dimensions if you’ve got Test Match Special on in your earpieces at the same time. I love TMS, but sometimes it can get very soporific.

So it was that weekend as I began dozing off, having attempted poorly to channel-surf my way towards something vaguely entertaining. That weekend this turned out to be a middle fragment of the afternoon’s offering of “Moonraker” in which the “not-a-Nazi-at-all-honest-guv” evil super-villain Hugo Drax was planning to repopulate the world with his own rather eugenic idea of what the “beautiful people” might be. This he planned to achieve by disposing of the chaff (that’s you and me, in case you hadn’t realised…) with some kind of dreadful weapon which seemed to be made out of processed orchids and then letting his new Adams and new Eves descend back down from the heavens and, presumably, bonk themselves stupid to generate a world full of pretty people who would quite probably be far too self-important to do the ‘ordinary’ jobs.

As super-evil plans go, I reckon they’d have lasted about a month before they all starved to death, but there you go.

I’ve never really worked out where these super-villains do their recruiting. Is it possible that I already work for an evil super-villain, but I just don’t know it? Will I only find out when my jumpsuit, beret and sub-machine gun arrive by courier with a bullet-pointed list of evil plans, which would be at least appropriate? I do like to think that I’ve would have the strength of character to resist any demands my employer might make towards including me in a scheme culminating in world domination, of course, but I suspect that these things would be so nicely dressed up in their power-point presentations (again, so appropriate… I’m starting to see a pattern here…) that I might not even notice until its too late and the suave secret agent is giving me a quick cold-steel plated trip towards eternity. Such thoughts plague me particularly whenever a trailer for “The Apprentice” appears, by the way…

That particular film was made in 1979 of course, which did leave me, in my dopey state, coming to the inevitable conclusion that the depopulated world was going to be repopulated by the offspring of the last days of disco, which, as my mind began to fuzzily switch itself to spending a brief and unexpected period in downtime mode, led to some quite surreal thoughts as my brain inevitably finally shut down and I sped off into my own peculiar version of dreamworld, a world inhabited by annoyingly pretty young things with bouffant hair, fixed grins, little conversation, no time for ugly little spuds like me, and a devastatingly effective cover drive that went way over the head of fielder at silly mid-off and scored a straight six right into the pavilion.

When I next woke up, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was blasting its way across the TV screen, confusingly featuring an earlier James Bond actor at a much later time in his life which made my brain go all “wibbly-wobbly” with confusion for a moment or two, especially as I was still trying to work out what happened to all those space shuttles. I stood up dizzily, and with that slightly odd taste in my mouth that follows an unscheduled nap, staggered zombie-like into the kitchen and made a mildly stimulating cup of tea, and returned towards the sofa with the prospect of another sleepy evening ahead, and pondering why it is that, even though you’ve actually got a film on DVD and you could therefore watch it at any time you wanted to, you only ever seem to actually watch it when it turns up on telly…?

Those are big questions for a sleepy person to ponder, and, whilst big questions might very well cause the brain to trigger itself into a distracting loop of middle-of-the-night activity, it was probably all got too much for me at that moment, as the tea went suddenly cold as Sean Connery’s supposedly last film transformed into a glitzy dancing competition, and another chunk of Saturday had mysteriously vanished forever.

*Statistics show that six out of seven dwarves are not happy (I know that's so un-PC, but it made me smile when I heard it...) Have a happy Monday, everyone...