Things that go creak/crash/snore in the night

Posted on August 29, 2008 by Hails

Snore! Snore! Snore!

I stare sleeplessly at the bunk above my head. I have ended up in a hostel in Rotterdam, as you do on the average Thursday night, and it is a funky little place. Very basic, but not a mouse in sight, and I’ve had fun hanging out with cool traveller dudes from all over the world in the very studenty bar. Sleep, however, is proving to be something of a challenge in a dorm containing dozens of beds.

If it was just the snoring, it might be easier to get used to it, the way you can eventually adjust to the overly loud ticking of a clock that’s been keeping you awake. However, in this sort of environment, all sorts of factors come into play. Like people rolling in at regular intervals, just back from a night out.

Crash! Bang! Clatter!

Snore! Snore! Snore!

Then you’ve got the mattresses, which are plastic-covered things that squeak and creak and groan every time someone as much as twitches in her sleep. When the girl above me turns over, it sounds like the building is in the process of crashing down around my ears.

Creak! Squeak! Groan!

Crash! Bang! Clatter!

Snore! Snore! Snore!

I sigh softly to myself and cuddle closer to Eeyore, who seems unaffected by the Armageddonesque noise level in the room. I close my eyes and try to imagine I’m completely alone. I manage to enter a state that could be described as a light doze, but am disturbed by a man stealthily entering the girls only dorm – my bed is right beside the door, so I watch as he creeps past and appears to be inspecting the sleeping figures in the bunks. In my tired state, I can do no more than wonder what he’s doing, and then I forget about him until morning, when I awake to find the place in uproar. Everyone’s babbling about a man, an attack. There are police. They want to talk to anyone who saw anything suspicious, and I find myself being interviewed and identifying the shady-looking guy from the dorm. He is taken away, shouting that he is innocent, and a feeling of Atonement-like panic washes over me as self-doubt creeps in and accuses me of pointing the finger at the wrong person.

Creak! Squeak! Groan!

As the girl above me turns over again and the mattress resumes its earthquake impressions, I wake up with a jump and realise that that last bit was just one of those very “real” dreams. Dazed and confused, I continue my sleepless journey towards morning.

I am desperately in need of a good night’s sleep tonight, you know.

Filed under: confusion, dreams, Fear, fun, hostels, insomnia, Netherlands, night, tiredness | 3 Comments »

I’ve been awake since 4…

Posted on May 10, 2008 by Hails

… which is a little unusual, given that I’ve not actually made it to bed until that time on several occasions of late.

This is my last blog post from Norn Iron. All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go, etc. etc. Except that they’re not, and I’m not, but sure. It’ll all come together any time now, I expect. Last night’s rather feeble attempt at sleep suggests that I’m going to be extremely tired for the next few days, but I’m already on my second cup of coffee of the day and it’s only 6.30am. No doubt the caffeine, suitably backed up by a large dose of adrenaline, will carry me through to my first destination.

Speaking of which. It feels decidedly strange to be heading off to a country I know next to nothing about. In fact, the only thing that sprung to mind when it was mentioned to me was “Eurovison Song Contest”. However, I feel that this is the way forward – leap into the unknown, visit all sorts of foreign places, and discover what’s out there beyond Ballymena. I am no longer afraid of “the unknown”. Well, actually, that’s a barefaced  lie – I’m utterly terrified. But in a delicious, excited, raring-to-go sort of way. Bring it on!

And so, the next time you hear from me will be when I become sufficiently awake to blog from Mystery Destination #1, following a ghastly middle-of-the-night flight involving a 2-hour jump forward in time. Much as I’d love to confuse you all by posting in the local language, I don’t think that’s likely to happen, as it is not one I’m at all familiar with. My passion for learning new languages means that I do, however, have my phrase book, so you can look forward to reading about enthusastic but terrible attempts to talk to the natives, resulting in me purchasing a small patch of land and several cows, when all I really wanted was a burger. It’ll be fun!

And I suspect that as long as I can say Ma vajan kohvi, everything will be just fine.

Filed under: blogging, changes, coffee, confusion, Fear, foreign languages, insomnia, tiredness, travel | 15 Comments »

How These Days Grow Long

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Hails

I’ve been working a 9-5 day for nearly four and a half years. When you stop that, you become suddenly disorientated. As a result, I have developed some extremely odd sleep patterns, and I’m pretty much at the point where day is night and night is day. It’s most unsettling.

I’ve just found the following, slightly alarming piece in my WordPress draft posts folder. I have no recollection of writing it. This, in itself, scares me, never mind the subject matter.

5am.
 
This is the depressing point, as far as daft sleep patterns go.
 
The point at which you know you should be asleep. When you’ve been attempting to do so for well over two hours. When birds are starting to chirp outside. When you’re too awake to sleep but too asleep to wake. When you start to think about things that worry and scare you much more than they ever would if it was the middle of the day and the sun was shining. When you regress to your childhood for no obvious reason, and find yourself humming the theme tune from The Sooty Show. When you feel you should do something constructive, since you’re awake anyway, but all you can do is wish you were asleep. When noises outside start to sound like they’re downstairs, and you take a nervous walk around the house, flipping on light switches and pretending to be tough for the benefit of the intruders who are not, as you first suspected, lurking behind every door. When you start to count down the minutes until you have to get up, and realise that you’re never, ever again in your life going to feel rested and energetic unless it’s 2am. When even the cat looks at you in some annoyance and clearly wishes that you’d just settle yourself and go to sleep.
 
This is the point at which the Night Madness sets in. Everything is upside down and back-to-front. Nothing makes sense anymore.
 
And I’m going to be awake forever.

Filed under: blogging, boredom, changes, confusion, contemplation, Fear, insomnia, laziness, memories, mental health, Sooty, tiredness, work, worry | 7 Comments »

Help in troubled times

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Hails

“… a load of postmodernist nonsense,” concludes Bluebeard, his hands flailing expressively. “And I was like, ‘You know what? What if you’re an onion? What if you just keep peeling away the layers, layer after layer, and you get to the centre and then realise, uh-oh, there’s nothing left? Why are you even here? If you’re going to take that line of thinking, you’re going to have to acknowledge that, actually, you probably don’t exist, you have no purpose whatsoever, and we’re not even having this conversation.’”

Once again, I seem to have found myself in the middle of an extremely bizarre conversation. Fortunately, with Bluebeard, it’s not especially necessary to participate in the conversation, and so I’m just listening dazedly, clutching my coffee cup, and occasionally glancing sideways at Billy and Selma for reassurance.

It’s just been that sort of day, really. I got about four hours of sleep last night, and when I woke up I found that the only coherent thought in my head was “ugh”. That’s it: just “ugh”. It wasn’t a particularly encouraging thought, and, in the hope that sharing it with a trusted friend would perhaps develop it somewhat (even just enough to encourage me to get out of bed and go to work), I texted Zed. “Ugh” said the text. I buried my head between two pillows and returned to my thought. I can always, always rely on Zed to say the right thing in a moment of despair. She texted back almost immediately. “Coffee helps.” said the text. I knew what I had to do.

Being decidedly low in supplies, the only coffee in my house at present is my emergency stash, which came from Lidl’s. In a solid block. Wrapped in gold foil. Today’s frame of mind and lack of any evidence of actually being human meant that such “coffee” simply would not suffice. I got dressed, scraped a few coins together, and drove to the nearest Caffeine Supply Stop.

“Ugh,” I said to the guy behind the counter, who had bloodshot eyes and appeared to be inhaling an espresso. “Ugh,” he replied, gruffly. It was a real meeting of minds. “Listen,” I said calmly, feeling my thought developing. “An Americano is the strongest thing I can get, here. But you need to put much, much more caffeine in it. A few more shots of espresso… actual whole coffee beans… I don’t care.” I looked pleadingly at him and smiled a rather desperate-looking smile. He nodded understandingly. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

Not another word was spoken between us as he prepared my medicinal mixture. I’ve no idea what he did to that coffee, but I suspect it wasn’t strictly legal. He watched me as I took a sip, and nodded in a satisfied manner as I made an indescribable sound of relief. I paid him (I think) and floated dreamily out of the building.

So potent was the concoction, I have not yet come down from the high. When some friends called round to visit me tonight, therefore, I was understandably zoned out. Bluebeard’s hyperactive chattering delighted rather than frightened me; an insignificant comment about an apostrophe became a most enjoyable discussion on the subject of Proper Punctuation. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to sleep tonight: I’m yawning, yet my head is a buzzing maze of profound, radical thoughts.

However, there is no doubt in my mind as to where I am going to go when I get up in the morning.

Filed under: advice, coffee, confusion, conversations, friends, insomnia, tiredness, weird | 3 Comments »

Coffee would have helped

Posted on March 6, 2008 by Hails

I am beyond tired.

This morning, I was a little worried about what on earth you’re meant to do when you reach this particular stage, because the fact that I was incapable of functioning meant that I could not quite summon up the energy to make coffee. I sat at my desk, eyes threatening to close, life happening all around me but in a strangely detached manner.

“What’s the time, Hails?” asked He Who Brings The Coffee, on his way out for a 10.30am appointment. I looked with great concentration at the computer screen, saw “10.09″ and said “10 past 9″. HWBTC looked at me in some confusion, clearly wondering if he had just experienced the longest 10 minutes of his life. “Err, I mean, 9 past 10,” I said dazedly, before realising that this was an abnormally specific way of answering his question. “I mean, um…” I trailed off and put my head in my hands.

“10 past 10?” he clarified. I nodded, ashamed of my lack of ability in the most basic of time-telling skills.

“Up late last night, again?” he enquired. I nodded, regretting my late night slash early morning geek-alert internet surfing and correspondence. Trying to maintain some small semblance of competence, I picked up a supplier leaflet with great dignity and began to study it intently. HWBTC stared at me for a long moment.

“Hails?” he said finally. “Get some coffee in you.” With that, he left, and I slumped back in relief that turned out to be short-lived when I realised that the leaflet I was so studiously poring over was actually for Domino’s Pizza. Not only that, but it was upside-down.

Making the coffee took an unfeasibly long time. When you’re this tired, it becomes a mammoth task to grind the beans, clean the filter, pour in the water, stand up straight etc. Finally, I switched on the machine with a triumphant, relieved flourish, and turned to investigate the chocolate biscuit situation. Upon turning back, I saw this.

Clearly, my effort had not been enough to ensure that I actually put the coffee, once ground, into the machine.

It was a long day.

Filed under: boss, coffee, confusion, conversations, insomnia, nerdiness, tiredness, work | 4 Comments »

Gibberwacky

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Hails

 ”Gibberwacky” may not appear to make much sense, but that is because it is, like, profound and stuff. You could try reading this poem first. It still won’t make any sense, but you’ll have a deeper sense of appreciation for my artistic genius.

‘Twas midnight, and the sleepy Hails
Did yawn and fidget in her chair.
All blurry were the words on-screen
And ’twas getting hard to care.      
                     *   *   * 
“Beware the Gibberwack, my dear!
The grammar mistakes, speling gone rong!
Beware the punctuation errors, and shun
Apostrophe’s where they don’t be’long!”    
                       *   *   * 
She took her coffee mug in hand:
Long time the sleepiness she fought.
So rested she upon the sofa
And kept on blogging; she blogged a lot.  
                        *   *   *    
And, as in drowsy thought she sat,
The Gibberwack, like sleeping gas
Came sneaking through the open door
And left her quite aghast.      
                *   *   *
Alas! Alack! The Gibberwack
Left Hails with drowsiness filled.
And when her eyes re-opened
Her coffee all was spilled.      
                *   *   *
“And, has thou slain the Gibberwack?
Why no! He took you out!”
The Gibberwack had got her words
And she knew not what she wrote about.  
                          *   *   *
‘Twas midnight, and the sleepy Hails
Did yawn and fidget in her chair.
All blurry were the words on-screen
And ’twas getting hard to care.

Filed under: blogging, confusion, insomnia, mental health, poems, tiredness | 3 Comments »

Great Day – Of Middle-Aged Gentlemen

Posted on January 20, 2008 by Hails

orange1.jpg

This is the new CD from my band, Great Day. Doesn’t it look like the must-have album of the decade?

Well, no. But that’s because I’m not trained in the art of CD cover production, and also because I don’t have a band. I was tagged by K8 the Gr8 and have dutifully done what was required of me in this latest meme. It was quite good fun, actually, because I couldn’t sleep last night and it gave me something vaguely productive to do instead of lying there counting patterns on the wallpaper. I hereby pass it on to… Grannymar. Have fun!

Here’s how it works.

This random article title is the name of your band.

The last four words of the very last quote is the name of your album.

The third picture on this page is your cover.

 Knock our socks off, Grannymar!

Filed under: album, band, boredom, insomnia, meme | 3 Comments »

Fevery Thoughts

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Hails

You see, this is what happens when you sleep all day. You find yourself awake in the middle of the night, googling your own name and looking up recipes for homemade ‘flu remedies.

If I go to sleep, will I dream about more traumatic and distressing things?

If I stay awake, will I ever be able to get up for work in the morning?

My ears are making a weird buzzing sound. I don’t mean that they’re going ‘buzzzzzzzzz’ in a manner that other people would be able to hear them (that would be weird), I mean in a more internal way. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz, they’re going, internally. Buzzzzzzzzzzz.

It’s foggy outside. Cold and dark and wet and foggy. Kind of spooky. If there was a Mysterious Creature prowling around the estate looking for sick people to eat, this is definitely the sort of night he would choose to appear. You can almost hear the orchestral horror movie soundtrack when you look outside.

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Did I lock the door?

It’s very cold, but I’m trying to make the heating oil last till Christmas so that I can buy more with any money I receive from relatives, so I try not to switch the heating on when I’m here by myself. I’m in bed with a dressing gown and a furry, purry cat. I would also have my hot water bottle, but the lid is missing, and I feel it wouldn’t work just as well without the lid.

I’ve just realised I can still say the entire alphabet in French.

Buzzzzzzzzzz.

Fever is a little like being drunk, only with a sore throat and buzzy ears as well.

Filed under: cat, Christmas, cold, coughing, dreams, heating, insomnia, pain, weird | 4 Comments »

Double Grande Insomnia

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Hails

I bounced cheerfully in the queue at Starbucks, chattering happily in the manner of an excited monkey (who has been on a coffee detox). Kate observed me with some amusement as she calmly ordered her Latte in a very orderly, grown-up kind of way. ”A venti Americano with an extra shot and room for milk, please!” I chirped eagerly. I idly picked up a packet of Christmas blend and sniffed it with a sigh of contentment as we waited.

There is nothing, nothing in the world quite like going into the cosy haven that is Starbucks, leaving the dark, wet coldness outside, sitting on a comfy sofa and drinking coffee with a friend and a gingerbread man. I imagine the streets in heaven to be paved with gold and lined with Starbucks.

We moved along to the counter where they serve your coffee. A large mug slid smoothly across the surface into my waiting hand. “Five-shot Venti Americano With Room For Milk,” came an accompanying holler. I looked nervously at the mug in my hand. “Hey,” I said to Kate, who was also gazing in mild interest at the mug, “what did she just say?” Kate pressed her lips together, glanced at me, looked once more at the mug, and said uncertainly, “It sounded like ‘Five-shot-Americano-With-Room-For-Milk’, you know.”

We fell silent, a sense of awe falling over us.

“Yeah,” I said cautiously, “I thought that’s what she said.” I suppose I just never really considered how many shots were actually in a venti Americano. I really thought I was getting two, to be honest… anyway. I’m not afraid of caffeine. I was only slightly nervous because I hadn’t been drinking my usual 10 cups a day, and I thought I might faint from the shock or something. I calmly lifted the Monster Coffee and went to add the milk, aware of Kate’s gaze following me, no doubt admiring my bravery and fearlessness. We sat down and surveyed my coffee for a while. Watching. Waiting. Wondering.

Then I drank it.

It was like smoking a cigarette when you’ve been off them for a month… the moment when the rollercoaster finishes its ascent and suddenly hurtles towards the ground… sheer, undiluted, pure exhilaration. It was nearly worth the whole detox ordeal. I have never tasted coffee that was So Amazingly Good.

Unfortunately, I lay awake for approximately 3 solid hours on Saturday night – caffeine never kept me awake when it made up a large percentage of my bloodstream.

Still. It’s the price you pay.

Filed under: coffee, friends, heaven, insomnia, Starbucks | 7 Comments »

Life… and death.

Posted on July 14, 2007 by Hails

At around 12.30am I very sensibly came home and went to bed. At 12.45am I got up, and wrote down 23 of the zillion Things I Have To Do that started bounding around like youthful rabbits in my head as soon as I switched off the light. 23 may seem like a random number. It is not. It is simply the number I got to on my list before I freaked out altogether and went to get some Comfort Cheese from the fridge.

Returned, gloomy and cheeseless, to the living room, with a most uncomforting nectarine and a pint of water, having spotted my I-refuse-to-live-my-life-as-a-hippopotamus memo on the fridge door.

23 things to do, and then what course of action does our heroine take? Why, she spends 2 hours reading through the archives of the latest hilarious blogger she has stumbled across. And so here I am – tired, hungry, stressed, and suffering from that weird sense of not being terribly sure whether my world is real, or if I actually personally know all the characters in afore-mentioned blog. 

It is ridiculous to be getting stressed out over the horrific number of (23) Things To Do when I’m currently only halfway through a fortnight-long holiday and therefore have simply masses and oodles and shedloads of free time. Unfortunately, my newly acquired geek status and the accompanying necessity of staying up all night reading the life stories of people I have never met has thrown my body clock not just off balance, but completely out the window and under the wheels of a passing PSNI armoured jeep. Thus/therefore/hence (or some other nice, stuffy literary word that might reasonably go at the start of this sentence), ‘oversleeping’ now no longer means ‘waking up at 8.45 and being 10 minutes late for work’, but is instead becoming closer and closer to ‘forgetting to actually get up at all during the daytime’. Leaving not much time at all to do the 23 things I absolutely must do. I’ve actually got that feeling of mild, rising panic that is beginning to border on nausea.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I am going to force myself out of bed at, say, 10.30am. I am going to drink a lot of coffee. I am going to prioritise and edit my List Of Horror. I am going to actually do some of the things on it. And then I am going to have an early night, so that on Sunday I can get up at 8am and set a pattern for the rest of the week, giving me back my masses and oodles and shedloads of time to accomplish everything else on said List Of Horror Perfectly Do-able List. Sometimes it just helps to organise my thoughts like this. I feel much more positive about the whole thing now. I even feel up to sharing an anecdote with you before I go to bed for not nearly enough sleep.

So Kate and He Who Brings The Coffee have gone to Tenerife for a week. They left at 5 o’clock this morning. I was a little surprised, then, to receive a text at 2pm from Kate:

Am in Portugal.

I considered this for a long moment, trying to analyse it for hidden meaning, but in the end could only conclude that she was in Portugal. I texted my reply.

Why?

I set the phone down on the table and went to put on a load of washing. I forgot about the phone for a while as I became engaged with a small but nonetheless real dilemma involving a whites wash, a red sock, and an already half-water-filled machine. When I returned, understandably harassed, I saw that I had a text message.

Woman may have died on plane. Diverted. Waiting for new plane from Heathrow.

Instantly visualised crime scenes, police tape, body bags, hostages, guns, sirens, blood and similar distressing things. The message was so incomplete, so vague, so very frustrating. For instance, “may have died”. MAY HAVE. Granted, I’m no expert in crime scene investigation and/or modern medicine, but I’d always thought Life and Death to be pretty easily distinguished from one another. I was also greatly intrigued by the idea of a “new plane” being sent. Why? Was the Possibly Dead Woman the pilot? Or had some kind of ‘old plane’ technological flaw contributed to the Unconfirmed Death, ruling out all future travel in that particular aircraft? Perhaps the Possibly Dead Woman had fallen victim to some kind of flesh-eating virus, X Files style, and the plane was in quarantine with a big tent thing around it (not unlike the one in E.T. with all the guys in spacesuits running around scaring the living daylights out of any small children who happened to be watching the film – not that I was ever psychologically damaged as a consequence of watching E.T., you understand). The possiblities flashed in my mind’s eye with increasing unlikeliness.

I may have sent back a dry, unimpressed message, implying that I was almost bored by the normality of their situation.

Don’t be flippant, came the reply, We are prisoners at Faro airport.

Made an obvious but undeniably hilarious “Faro, Faro, let my people go” joke. Was subsequently ignored for a few hours. Then:

You know, they have made blockbusters out of experiences like this.

Another few hours of unanswered questions and mounting curiosity. I will admit that the thought “Kate is lying on a sun lounger by the hotel pool in Tenerife, sipping an iced drink, reading a Danielle Steele book, soaking up the rays and laughing at me” did cross my mind, but I dismissed it almost instantly. Kate would never read Danielle Steele.

Bing-bong!

A text! Almost dropped the phone in my sheer desperation to find meaning and answers. Unfortunately neither one of these needs was met in a text message that read:

Contemplating locking self in toilets for peace. People losing plot. 2 meal vouchers each. No pilot for new plane. Woman dead.

Honestly.

And so I have been left with many, many unanswered questions. Granted, the Possibly Dead Woman’s condition has been clarified, having changed from ‘Possibly Dead’ to ‘Dead’. But so many things remain unknown. Like, how did the ‘new plane’ get to Faro from Heathrow without a pilot? What happened to the original pilot from the ‘old plane’? Are my previous quarantine/E.T. theories correct? Has Kate been detained as a suspect? Where is He Who Brings The Coffee? What is the significance of the 2 meal vouchers?

Is it any wonder I can’t sleep at night?

You know what… I think the sun is actually starting to rise. This is beyond ridiculous. I must now go to bed. Good morning to you all.

Filed under: death, friends, hippopotamus, humour, insomnia, Mishaps, tiredness, travel | 2 Comments »

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