White Nights

‘Nuits blanches’ is what the French call sleepless nights. White nights when the eyelids and mind won’t close and the blackness of total oblivion refuses to descend. Here is a pic of my cat. He can sleep anywhere, in any position, paws up, dangling off the edge of table or chair, on top of a half-inch-wide fence (he weighs 18lbs and the billows of flubber hang down on either side). He can fall asleep in the middle of washing himself, tongue out, head drooping, one back leg poking up in the air. Oh, to be so talented at sleeping.

For me, sleep is all about noise. Annoying noise. The 3am moron with thumping bass rapping from his car stereo; the rain thundering on the Velux window above your head; the tap-tap of a twig or loose TV or telephone flex against the gutter; the rustling of a plastic bag somewhere in the bedroom (your rational brain knows you took something out of it and disturbed its folds earlier, but right now, could it be the sinister work of a burglar loosening the window latch, or the stealthy creeping of a monstrous spider?); the sounds of your own interior workings, whooshings, gurglings, monstrously amplified by your over-alert senses; the deafening blackbird at 5am, your signal that you may as well give up and get up.

I used to smile smugly when friends complained about insomnia. “Never happened to me,” I’d say. Talk about tempting fate. From the moment the doc refused to renew my HRT prescription two years ago, Morpheus stopped visiting. No amount of herbal sleep aids, scented candles, relaxation cd’s or cups of warm milk (yuk) could persuade him to take me in his dark-winged arms and waft me off to the realms of dreamland. After a few months, I swapped the softly-softly approach for the cudgel. Temazepam (worked well but the doc would only give me 20 and that was 18 months ago); antihistamines (Phenegan worked brilliantly but the chemist warned of a strange side-effect. It thinned the skin on your arms, making you much more prone to sunburn, so I threw out the rest of my packet). Night Nurse and Benilyn Original were the big cannons in my armoury.

Then I went to Spain and discovered – oh happy day! – that you could buy sleeping tablets over the counter. I now take half a Limovan about three times a week (no, the GP doesn’t know so please don’t think this is good advice) and the rest of the time I resort to the second best solution, a glass or two of red wine, the heavier and fruitier the better or, like last night, I lie there counting not sheep, but how many jobs I have to finish by the end of the month, and wondering how the hell I’m going to fit them in. When I’m not doing that, I’m writing book chapters or song lyrics and melodies in my head. This is why I call my brand of insomnia ‘busy brain syndrome’. Once it starts chunnering and churning, I know I’m in for a very long, wakeful night.

There is hope, though. Last night I tried imagining I was a balloon floating over familiar territory. The park. My sister’s house in Cumbria. A blue balloon floating gently on a soft breeze. Then I woke up. This morning. I think I may be onto something….