19 May 2021

3.45am

How annoying. I fell asleep watching "Newsnight" and that unintended nap lasted far too long. Consequently, when I did climb the stairs to bed, sleep evaded me. I lay there waiting for the magic to happen - for sleep to embrace me once again before carrying me off to the land of dreams and revitalisation. But after an hour I realised it was not going to happen so I came back downstairs and made a  mug of  tea which is now sitting next to this laptop with two "McVities" gingernuts.

After switching the laptop on, I wondered what I might blog about here in the silence of the night as this great northern city sleeps. All the lights in our neighbourhood are off apart from ours and outside the true citizens of the night have reclaimed the streets  - tom cats, owls, urban foxes, badgers rodents and bats. Reaching up the valleyside come the faraway sounds of a train and an ambulance siren.

Brains can be such a torment. They seem to constantly throw up images, memories, ideas, phrases, plans, Mine does anyway. A ceaseless chain like mental bunting stretching to some distant horizon. How lovely it is when that process slows and how lovely it is to sleep.

A nice thing about this sleepless hour is that I know I do not have to hurry off to work at daybreak. There's none of that old pressure to get the zeds in as before - knowing that if sleep time is lost one's functionality will be reduced during those  demanding working hours. No. Not sleeping now does not really matter any more. Very few duties to perform this May 19th. Pick up Frances and Phoebe to take them to their lunch date. Do a little grocery shopping. See a central heating engineer about our boiler. Make the evening meal. I can handle all of that.

There were many things I might have blogged about in the middle of this night. Really, I am never stuck for blog content and it quite amazes me how much ground I have covered since June 2005 when this blog began. 3626 blogposts in total. It has been a hell of a journey and just like sleep the blogging process remains pretty magical to me.

As I say - so many things I might have blogged about but I decided not to bother. The tea mug is empty. The gingernuts are gone. It's 3.45am and over in the east the sky is slowly lightening. Maybe it's time to give sleep another try.

38 comments:

  1. I hope you managed to get some sleep YP. I, too, have been wide awake since 4 a.m., sitting on the sofa wrapped in my duvet looking out at the pink tinged clouds of daybreak.

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    1. I noticed the eastern sky getting lighter as I looked outside before mounting the stairs.

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  2. unusually for me, I was awake at 4am and didn't manage to get back to sleep. A gingernut might have helped but I never get up and eat because I don't want to clean my teeth again!
    I hope you caught some rest

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    1. Live wild Kylie! You don't have to brush your teeth every time. I did get back to sleep - five hours of it!

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  3. I hope you managed to get some sleep when you went to bed again. With daylight coming rather early now, I find myself waking up earlier, too. The bird's morning concert in the gardens around my house may have something to do with it as well.
    Yes, sleep is magical. I hate it when I can not sleep, and I very much like your comparison with mental bunting. At times, my mental bunting is pretty frazzled, at other times, I manage to keep it very neat.
    So you are ferrying little Phoebe around - that's one of many grandpa duties, provided that grandpa has a car. Mine didn't, but we usually went to places on foot anyway, no problem where we lived.

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    1. When did your grandpa pass away Meike? So nice that you can remember him.

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    2. Both my grandpas died in 1989, but I was close only to my maternal Opa. He was a dream Opa, the kind I wish every child could have. Never too busy for us, always willing to make things for us, tell us stories, take us for walks and so on.
      I was 21 when he died, so I was lucky to have him around for my entire childhood and youth.

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    3. That was indeed a special blessing - for him too!

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  4. Hope you managed to get back to sleep Mr Pudding and are feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.

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    1. I got five more hours Sue but not enough to turn me into a rabbit!

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  5. Doing 'anything' in the middle of the night is so different from doing the same thing in daytime. I used to love driving, cycling, or walking around London at 3 am. It seemed a totally different place.

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    1. Before long I hope to go for a long country walk when there's a full moon and a cloudless sky. It will indeed be so different.

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  6. There's nothing worse than being awake in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep. My sleep has not brilliant for decades. It started when my daughter would not sleep through the night until she was 8 YEARS old. But lately I have found I wake several times in a night - a good night is only 3 times, a bad night can be 9 times. It is probably partly because of Covid anxiety (a lot of people seem to be struggling with that) and partly old age coming on (people tend to need less sleep as they get older). Either way the days of 8 hours' solid sleep is a distant memory. Hope your sleep is better tonight.

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    1. Normally I enjoy a good and long night's sleep - 7 or 8 hours so last night's sleeplessness was unusual. Sorry to hear about your fractured sleep pattern ADDY.

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  7. You may also be interested to see you are not the only one posting on sleeplessness today
    https://reluctantmemsahib.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/the-shapeless-unease/#comment-27468

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  8. So, your thought are like 'mental bunting' and its better when they stop? Victor Meldrew said he wished he could turn it off.

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    1. Hang on - I thought you were Victor Meldrew!

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  9. I am so glad you were able to return to sleep Mr YP. I often wake up at 4 and although I won't get out of bed until at least 5. The dog benefits from this as we go walking as soon as it is light and the only people I see are those taking the bus into the city. Enjoy your visit with Frances and Phoebe.

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    1. I have always been a night owl. The early mornings are something pof a curiosity.

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  10. I just looked. I have posted 8683 blog posts. That seems impossible.

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    1. You have been incredibly productive Ms Moon. That is more than double the number of posts that I have churned out.

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  11. If it weren't for the fact that my daytime naps often get interrupted, I quite like being up in the middle of the night when nobody else is.

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    1. I agree Ed. There is a certain attraction.

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  12. Do you really get badgers roaming the streets at night? That's one animal I have never seen in London, but I'd like to believe they're here somewhere.

    I hate it when I wake up in the middle of the night, and you're right -- brains DO seem full of torment at that hour. I'm always amazed how I'll worry about something in the middle of the night and then, in the morning, it will seem so minor.

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    1. Morning puts many things in proper perspective. Yes - we do indeed have badgers in our suburbs.

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  13. You realize how lack of sleep impairs our performance. Teaching with lack of sleep made for a long day. When you become elderly, sleeping is quite often interrupted. That's why many seniors have naps in the day time. Your nap got away on you. Nice description of early morning.

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    1. Teaching after a sleepless night would make me tetchy and more liable to make mistakes.

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  14. I'm glad that you managed to get back to sleep YP - nothing worse than lying awake waiting for sleep to come.
    As a chronic insomniac, I sometimes don't sleep at all, and wonder why I even bother to go to bed! I've read many articles about insomnia and how to combat the problem and tried many of the remedies - all to no avail. One thing I have learned though, is not to use the computer late at night - something to do with the brightness of the screen. Not that it makes any difference to my sleeping pattern.

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    1. Well after typing this blogpost I was asleep in a couple of minutes when I went back upstairs so spending time on screen did not hinder me. Sorry to hear you are a chronic insomniac CG. It must be so frustrating - especially when you are really tired.

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  15. I also began blogging in 2005 and have only produced about half as many posts as you. I don't know how your content and frequency of posting has evolved over the years, but mine changed several times. My earliest entries are lost to cyberspace which might not be a bad thing. There were an awful lot of goat posts...

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    1. You used to keep goats? Do you still keep them?

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    2. We did, along with donkeys. These days we just have cows (beef, not dairy) and bees. And a pond full of fish.

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  16. We always take a nap around 2p.m. This means that we are able to go to bed around 11p.m. read for a bit and sleep soundly. If we slept any later in the day we would have the same problem. On the other hand, I like the stillness of the middle of the night.
    As for eating ginger nut biscuits, I would be up for the rest of the night with indigestion if I did that. lol
    Briony
    x

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    1. That late night stillness can certainly be appealing - when the rest of the world is asleep.

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  17. I love that about retirement too. No stress when I have a touch of insomnia. No pressure to get up at a certain time.

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    1. The clock does not matter as much as it used to.

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  18. It's nice to have days when the clocks don't matter!

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Mr Pudding welcomes all genuine comments - even those with which he disagrees. However, puerile or abusive comments from anonymous contributors will continue to be given the short shrift they deserve. Any spam comments that get through Google/Blogger defences will also be quickly deleted.

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