Thursday 21 January 2016

sing me to sleep...

You know you’re getting old when you start remarking to your colleagues that you’ve just had two really good nights’ sleep in a row. They were good enough not to laugh in my face, but I could see what they were really thinking. It’s true though: I’ve had a stinking cold for the last week, with a couple of restless nights. It was brilliant to go to bed early on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night and to have 8 hours of almost unbroken rest before heading into work. How often does that happen? Not often enough that I didn’t feel the need to talk about it at work the next day, that’s for sure.

I like sleeping. I don’t do anywhere as near as much of it as I would like, but it’s one of life’s pleasures, isn’t it? A good, long sleep in a comfortable bed and with no particular place to be in the morning: bliss. How often does that happen in a year? I think that one of the saddest things about getting older and having a job is that, even when you don’t have to be in the office, your body is still conditioned to wake up at the crack of dawn and you just seem to lose the ability to lie in bed for hours on end. My teenage self is disgusted with me.

I don’t even really get to lie-in at the weekends any more, either. And the worst part about that is that it’s entirely self-inflicted: parkrun on a Saturday and a long run on a Sunday. What with marathon training and all, it’s small wonder that I now spend most of my weekend afternoons asleep on the sofa. I don’t even think I can blame my MS, dammit. Tiredness and fatigue are completely different things, and I’m lucky enough to only get the former very occasionally (and when I do, it’s like the power-switch has been pulled and my body just shuts down rather than gently drifts up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire).

I like to think that I’m a night-owl and will happily burn the midnight oil on any day of the week, just pottering about, reading a book or listening to some music. This is now plainly a fantasy. This might have been true once-upon-a-time, but it definitely isn’t true now. I usually make it to 10pm, but even that’s not guaranteed these days, as the eyes start to sag on the sofa almost the moment I’ve finished my tea.

Still, the one good thing about getting older is that I pretty much don’t give a shit what anyone else might think about this. So much for getting old disgracefully.

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