Sleepy News

I read the other day that a university in some part of the United States has been researching the effects of insomnia on fruit flies. Me neither and I couldn't agree more. 

I read this because the words sleep and insomnia caught my attention. I don't own up to being an insomniac. I'm what you'd call an irregular sleeper. In my wild youth, I could I could sleep for oh around 10 hours or more. Then marriage and children changed that a bit. And now, when I live on my own and could sleep for 20 hours without someone saying as much as "fruit fly", I can't. 

I try to do all those things that are recommended.  I don't have my mobile in my bedroom (unless I need to set the alarm for any reason - no reason since lockdown), I do not have a television set in the room. I read for around half an hour, usually a crime novel. Then I switch off the light, turn on BBC's Radio 4 or RTE's Radio 1 and try to drift off to sleep. I wake around an hour and a half later and toss and turn for at least an hour. When there's a full moon, I usually can't drift off for longer than that, so I trot into the living room and scroll Twitter or read poetry for an hour or more. I go back to bed and finally doze off, waking at around 8.30 a.m.  I have learned to live with it, more or less. Tried taking a sleeping tablet but that didn't seem to do the trick. I guess I need less sleep, unlike the fruit flies.

In case you are dying of curiosity, the university doing the research discovered that when deprived of sleep, fruit flies crashed into walls, totally disoriented. Maybe I should look at those sleeping tablets again....

Sleepy Summer Time and Memories

Here it is again.  Summer Time.  Someone somewhere, with very little interest in the comfort of their fellow human beings, decided we should put the clocks forward at the end of March and deprive ourselves of an hour's sleep because summer is coming.  Daylight saving.  That was the magical excuse.  Daylight saving.  It sounds great.  Can you save daylight?  If so you are in business.  The whole operation should be termed Sleep Deprivation Mode.

Of course I don't really mean that.  But I used to mean it years ago when I was a working mother and every five minutes extra sleep meant another piece of sanity gained.  Let's face it, we have to get up every week morning since we are tiny.  First there's kindergarten, school, college and then comes the big one:  work. For most of my life I needed 8-10 hours sleep and I very often had to make do on considerably less.  The sound of that alarm at 6 a.m. made me not only moan and groan, it made me positively bad tempered.  Five minutes more pleaded my inner sleepy voice.  But the race for the bathroom was on.  With teenagers in the house who also had to be up and doing, if you missed your bathroom slot you were going to be left behind.

I am sure I never spoke more than five words.  "Bye, see you, got your keys?"  Once at work, I grabbed a coffee and then crouched behind my computer and started into the day's work with only the obligatory "good morning" to those early birds who were already in the office. If no one spoke to me for the first half an hour all was well and my sense of humour - never buried that far down - surfaced and I evolved into a fairly rational human being.  But if someone phoned me before that all important thirty minutes were up, I went straight into "bad mood" mode and it took me a while to get back on an even keel.  Yes, I know, I'm truly a disgrace but that's the way it is.

I'm enjoying the fruits of retirement now and don't have to get up early, I'm not tied to an alarm clock most of the time.  Only thing is, now that I could sleep 10 hours if I wanted to, I can't sleep that long.  In fact, the advent of Summer Time this Sunday isn't going to affect me much as I'll be awake early anyway.  That's life, isn't it? Well, if not life, it's Summer Time. Sleep well everyone.