ahoota gagea
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 21/Sep/2010 06:14, 34 days ago
There are lots and lots of annoying things about waking up in the middle of the night and finding yourself incapable of getting back to sleep again. It's a habit I just about managed to kick in the UK as I worried less and less about work having handed in my notice. But, bizarrely, I'm doing it here - where there's nothing to really worry about and work is a vasty cloud of vacant interstellar spaces. Probably the very worst bit is this feeling now, when - just before going to work o'clock -it's too late to go back to sleep again, and my body's suddenly got with the programme and realised that two hours sleep doesn't really wash it. Too late, body mine!The good thing, though, has always been the joy of reading in bed. With the probable exception of sleeping in the back seat of a car travelling at night as rain lashes down outside (which I think features in a very lovely Peanuts strip), reading by torchlight in bed - ideally under some covers - is the safest and merriest feeling in the world.It'd be insane to read under covers here, because all that'd be left of me in the morning would be a soggy puddle and some oozing pages of Dostoyevsky. But we are blessed with a mosquito net - kind of a fairy four poster bed, but with protective properties. So everything feels like you're doing it in one of those tents you made when you were little. And I can either read Milton on my ipod (what a beautiful thing! This isn't an advert but, seriously, reading anything on a glowing little ipod in the midst of a great darkness feels like proof positive that unicorns exist in the 21st century) or Dostoyevsky with a nifty little reading torch that lovely Laura sent me. So it's like reading under the covers with a torch, butbetter, because there's no actual torch to clutch, making your fist and wrist ache with the effort.And all around, outside and beneath and probably inside the cocoon of the bed, creatures scuttle on nighttime errands - more secret ministry of frost than black agents to their prey rousing. And outside the room (usually, though not last night) there's a howling wind and hammering rain as the clouds seek to crack their cheeks. Plus, I wasn't married when I was ten, and there's something very splendid about being able to flip between blowing different bits of your mind with nifty writing and looking over at your wife. InDon Juan, I think it's Haidee who's cradling Juan after he's been shipwrecked, and there's one of those rare stomach-lurchingly tender stanzas about this very experience and its joys, with something about 'all that we have of love with them is sleeping'. Look it up, those of you with unfettered internet access. It rocks.None of this will be a compensation in around three hours time when I can barely drag my eyes to look at the time, or wrench my brain through the clunking cogs of how many more endless minutes there are to endure of an almost certainly entirely meaningless workshop. But at the time, being the sole unquiet thing when all that mighty heart is lying still is a pure joy.