The Insomnia Bird

In the early hours of New Year's Day (about 2.25 am I think, though I was a bit vague and blurry by then), I switched on my white noise machine, composed myself for slumber, then became aware that the machine had developed a strange squeak, rather like small, badly oiled hinges.

'Damn it!' I thought angrily. At £75 plus postage, you don't expect a machine you've only had for a month to develop a fault, especially as the company I bought it from told me that, of all the ones they had ever sold, they'd only had about four back and those were ones that had been damaged in accidents and had come back for repair.

I clambered out of bed, snaring toes in duvet and stepping in the sticky patch where the Benilyn bottle had stood, switched off the machine and scrambled back into bed. The squeaky creaking continued. Was somebody cycling home very slowly and drunkenly on an ancient, rusty bicycle? I got up again and staggered to the window. The road, for once, was silent and empty yet the sound continued. Then I realised it was coming from one of next door's trees on the other side of the fence very close to my bedroom window. It was a bloody bird, joyously heralding in the New Year, probably having swigged from the lager can that had been carelessly tossed into the bushes in our front garden. I'd noticed it when I came home earlier.

My next thought was, 'what a good omen for 2008, a bird singing like that.' Deciding it was just for that one night, I switched my machine back on and fell asleep.

But of course it wasn't just for one night, was it? The wretched thing was at it again last night too. It's probably got it into its head that to be in with a chance of finding the perfect avian romance for 2008, it had better start broadcasting now. I think it must be a blackbird - that is, if the Beatles song about, 'Blackbird singing in the dead of night' bears any relation to normal blackbird behaviour. You certainly don't get nightingales in January. But if it carries on, I shall learn to use a lasso pretty damn fast.

SOUND CONDITIONERS: having suffered great difficulty in getting off to sleep since coming off HRT two years ago, and having spent the last eighteen months in a bedroom with a bullet hole through the double glazing (scroll through early posts for the story) and a relentless stream of vehicles cutting through to the A40, I first experimented with earplugs. They were quite successful at blotting out the traffic noise, but didn't help me get off to sleep, or stay asleep, and also gave me regular outbreaks of earache and eczema in the ears. One trip to the ENT dept at the hospital resulted in the specialist removing a flake of skin the size of a large potato crisp, that had peeled off the inside of my ear and was covering my eardrum like an aural condom. No wonder the world was muffled!

In desperation, I trawled the Web for advice (as one does) and found a company called Electronic Healing - www.electronichealing.co.uk - where I read the reviews of their Sound Conditioners and chose the Sound Screen Sleep Mate Dual Speed Conditioner (£75). It has changed my life. Although it doesn't blot out every sound (like the bloody blackbird) - the company say that they are legally obliged to set them below a certain volume level so that in an emergency the sleeper could still hear a fire alarm, or someone banging at the door - what it does is calm your mind and lull you off to sleep, as well as hushing a certain amount of ambient sound. So the traffic roar becomes a swooshing which, in my brain, turns into the sound of waves rolling in to the shore, so I am hypnotised into slumber. It's brilliant. I am sleeping so much better but, if my mind is still restless, I have another little trick up my sleeve that I shall write about next time.