I think I can safely say this isn't one of the high points in my short little life. Sat at my kitchen table at two o'clock in the morning wide awake and drinking Carlsberg. This isn't what I wanted, I wanted to be cosy and warm all tucked up in my nice-ish comfy bed. But clearly I'm not, and that's because I dabbled with the forbidden art of napping.
Earlier on today I gave blood. Not that unusual, I've done it a couple of times before, and I've always been feeling tickety-boo afterwards, save perhaps a little bit of light-headedness and my left arm feeling a bit colder than the rest of my body, but never before have I returned feeling as tired as I did today. You know that feeling when your entire body feels like it's going to just shut down whether you're laying down or not? Well, I wasn't quite that bad, but bugger me* I was knackered. Come five o'clock (that's 1700 hours military time Mat), I decided to bite the bullet and go to sleep. Before now, I've been able to sleep for fourteen hours straight with relative ease, but for some reason, my body must have finished making all the blood it needed, because it decided to wake me at eight. Not a problem, I thought, and I decided that I'd just go to bed at my normal time and wake up a few hours earlier. After all, it's an excuse to see the sun rise, isn't it? And I'm sure you've guessed, I didn't manage it. Six hours on from waking up and I'm still feeling like I've had a full night's rest, and that's just bloody unfair.
For those of you who don't know me personally (and that's a depressingly small minority), I am a very good sleeper. I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere and strangely I actually sleep better through thunderstorms, but this is most likely due to the fact that Britain's thunderstorms are about as threatening as week-old piece of celery. Regardless, the feeling of not being able to sleep is very alien to me, and hasn't occurred in many years, but affects several of my friends, most of whom cope with it very well. Unlike them, however, I am not practiced in the art, and the only times I can remember being up this late in the past twenty four months would be either for work or at a party where I should have been in bed hours ago. Suffice to say, this is pretty new ground.
Usually I welcome time alone, but recently I've had a bit of a lull in my number of shifts at work, so I haven't had the stress levels that I've become used to over the past few months, and it's just occurred to me that I'm not entire sure where this is going.
I could ramble on and on in order to use up some of the time I've got left before my body lets me fall unconscious and hallucinate vividly, but that's not the nub of what this post is about. No, this post is about a very serious matter indeed, and I need your full concentration to help me work out what it is, because I've no bloody clue.
Should have though about this a bit more before I committed to writing it really.
*Please ask first, I don't like surprises
