Waiting for Papa Goodsleep

Last night I watched the whole of series three of Blackadder in a sitting. You'll have to excuse me if I use a lot of mock-eighteenth century speak, and similies so comically ridiculous you could give them a tragic ending and call them "Ben Elton". Now, on to the blog.

I havn't been sleeping all that well. This isn't because of some Werdmuller kind of nightmare world... I don't know about you, but I think that guy's name should be an adjective. In fact, I'm going to start using it as such:

"Werdmuller: adj; Entertaining but also unsettling, using elements of the ridiculous to illustrate a serious point."

In point of fact, I'm going to put a full stop here, so if you want to go and read the article I'm referring to, and incidentally to settle the word Werdmuller into your consciousness, now's a good time to do it. I'll wait. That link again.

So anyway, yes, sleeping. Now is the spring holiday in my terms, and I decided to stay up in Oxford because I never, ever, achieve anything whatsoever while in Devon. Two of my housemates went home, leaving only me and Housemate Mariko. Unfortunately she has a significant other and consequently spends a fair proportion of time in places like Coventry and Wiltshire. During that time, alone in the house, I do tend to go a little bit "Phantom of the opera", living entirely off Pot Noodle and Red Kidneybeans. This state was bought to a pitch when I discovered the date on my mobile phone was wrong, and consequently it was Thursday, and not Friday as I had believed. That can really mess you up. The transition to Daylight Saving Time didn't help, either. Damn you, DST!

I also consider DST to be a major factor in the breakdown of my sleeping habits, because the major effect that it has is to make the sun go down an hour later, and consequently it is considerably lighter when I'm trying to sleep. Another apsect of this, though, is that now I'm living in the big bad city. If I look out of my window back in Devon, I can see West Cleave Farm, the valley of the spring that leads to the River Wolf, a hydro-electric resevoir, a pine forestry and, 12 miles away across the river Tamar, the town of Launceston. The population isn't very dense. It's a bucolic background worthy of Clark Kent. Here, there's quite a lot more light pollution. I did, on one occasion, come up with a cunning plan. I used my Phantom Cape (read: dressing gown) as a kind of super-curtain. The downside, which in my addled two-a-m state I didn't forsee, was that it meant the light level reached wake-up levels shortly after noon the following day. It's a vicious cycle that is making my lifestyle slip inexorably towards being completely nocturnal, like some kind of PPE student. I'm fighting it the best I can.

How to combat this, one:
Get more exercise and less Fermi-Dirac distributions.

two:
Stop drinking so much tea.
Perhaps this is an aspect of the Phantom effect, but I think it's really par for the course when you're looking at k-space diagrams for several hours of each day. I've managed to slurp my way through a box of Teadirect tea (or "real tea" as I like to call it). I'm now making a reluctant assault on a battered box of "Tesco Premium tea" which has been on our kitchen shelf for some months now. The word "Gentleman" used to mean a man who owned land and had noble ancestry: Nowadays it means someone making a complaint in a shop. A similar fate has befallen the word "premium".

three: Don't go upstairs after dinner except to sleep. By doing this, I hope to build associations of sleep and altitude. I did an AS level in Psychology, you know.

four: If all else fails, buy some rum.
I know what you're thinking. I agree, it's probably not a good idea to knock out the knees of my consciousness with a chemical broom handle. Having said that, alcahol is a chemical that affects your brain in such a way that sleeping on a sofa seems like the pick of the draw. A short, exciting period of my life between the ages of 15 and 17 confirm this, but the voice of that time also warns me that that is how people wake up with "I like fish" written on their foreheads. I've seen in done. Long story.

And in case you're wondering, here's where today's title came from.

Song in my head: "Bird Machine" by Candidate, from a CD I'm borrowing from Housemate Jo, herself having borrowed it from Oldfriend Lydia. Thanks to both of them for their unwitting part in widening my musical horizons, and my propensity to steal