Katyboo1’s Weblog

I woke up this morning with a stiff neck and shoulder.  I also woke up lying flat on my back, which I don’t usually do.  I like to sleep in the foetal position, on my left side with the duvet over my head and only an air hole with which to breathe.  I can only assume as I woke up staring at the ceiling and in excruciating agony that either Jason had mugged me in the night, or I had fallen asleep by accident due to being bloody knackered, and had clearly not moved a muscle during the night.  This was very weird.  I don’t do this spontaneously falling asleep thing very often.

I hate falling asleep and I usually have to spend quite some time fooling myself that I am in fact doing something else and not really going to sleep.  I am a person who likes to be in control and I can’t monitor things when I am asleep, which distresses me slightly.  The other things I don’t like about going to sleep are the sensation of falling, which is just too weird and horrible; being able to hear my blood surging round my body when it’s very quiet and my ear is in the wrong position on the pillow, and the hideous dreams.  I do have really, really hideous dreams.  I also have really bizarre dreams.  The only things I don’t have are really cheerful dreams.  I used to live with a bloke who would sometimes wake me up laughing in his sleep.  That’s just wrong.  The only times I usually spontaneously fall asleep is when I am watching something excruciatingly boring on telly and I am too warm.

Actually the only other times I have fallen asleep like this was when I have been hideously drunk.  Falling asleep is probably not a fair description actually.  Falling into a drunken coma would be more like it.  I used to hate that.  I would wake up, rigid as a board, with a throbbing head, and usually some kind of spit product attaching me to the bed clothes where I had clearly been too far gone to even stop myself from sleep drooling.  The mere thought of getting up was always agonising, but so was the thought of staying there in a stinking alcohol induced sweat fug with a full bladder and my brain trying to escape out of my ear.  I really, really do not miss drinking at all, when I think back to the ludicrously bad hangovers, of which this description was a mere bagatelle.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love sleeping, once I’m actually doing it.  I’m also quite good of it once I get there.  I’m sure you will have gathered this from the whole ‘I’m so tired’, ‘I don’t get enough sleep’, ‘It’s not fair’, whinge which has run continually through this blog from its inception.  When I am asleep I begrudge being woken up, or any form of having to get up when I’m not good and ready.  I’ve never been a staying in bed all day kind of person mind you.  I tried it once and I didn’t like it.  In fact I cheated, because I got out of bed and went to the sweet shop in the middle of the day and came back with supplies so that I could be more cheerful about the rest of my stay.  I also hate watching the television in bed, and refuse to have a television in the bedroom.  Televisions in multiple rooms of a house are a scourge of modern society in my humble opinion.

The whole falling asleep with the duvet over my head thing came from having an extremely vivid imagination as a child.  As all good children (i.e. proper children rather than well behaved children) know, one of the best things is being frightened in a good way.  I used to get my mum to read me the Ladybird book of Little Red Riding Hood.  It scared the living crap out of me, and I absolutely loved it to bits.  Naturally, after having read it a billion times, my mum hated it.  She should have been thankful it wasn’t Thomas The Tank Engine which is not only long, and written in incredibly tiny typeface, but possibly one of the most boring books ever to have graced the shelves of a library.  Nevertheless, she didn’t see it that way, and she used to try everything to try and get me to vary my reading requirements.  It did not work.

The only other thing I used to read during this time period was a Richard Scarry anthology of nursery rhymes which came as a little fat book with those weird furry pages where they clearly haven’t varnished the pages, or whatever they do to make them super shiny.  My favourite page was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which I also used to obsess over endlessly.  I used to stroke the page for some obscure and slightly worrying reason.  One evening after I had been frightened to death by Red Riding Hood, I carefully extracted the Scarry book from the shelf only to find that the page had disappeared.  I clearly remember accusing my mum of having ripped it out so that she didn’t have to read it to me again.  Apparently it had just worn out through being loved too much.  How tragic!

Anyway.  I was absolutely terrified of the wolf, and lived in perpetual fear that the wolf was going to come and get me in the night.  I devised many cunning plans to fool the wolf into not eating me.  I tried sleeping under the bed, but my mum was not sympathetic and soon put paid to that one, despite me still believing to this day that it would have worked.  I was however, cruelly forced to actually sleep in the bed.  I tried sleeping upside down with my feet near the pillow, but then my toes used to peep out and give the game away.

I also tried sleeping sideways across the bottom of the bed, but I used to get too hot and too cramped.  I would try lying as thinly as possible, spreading myself out and squeezing all the air out of my body, but that was actually a lot more difficult than it sounds.  I eventually came across the foetal to the left with small airhole device.  It clearly worked, as I am here today, unrepentantly alive and with no signs of mauling by wolf about my person.  It drives Jason mad though, as it means that I invariably pull the duvet up diagonally across the bed and expose his feet to the chills of the cold night air.  He tries to reason with me, saying that I am more likely to be battered to death by him than I am to be eaten by a wolf.  After years of training I believe him rationally, but my subconscious mind is having none of it.  We’ve survived lupine attack so far in this way and if it has worked up to now who are we to start innovating at this late stage in the game?

I believe I may have been latently OCD for some parts of my childhood, as I used to get these weird routines and attachments to things.  Actually, that’s bollocks, that’s just kids all over isn’t it?  I only eat baked beans for ten years and then suddenly decide I hate them and will only eat courgettes if you staple a fake smile to them etc.  Yes, scrap the OCD thing.  All perfectly normal weird shit that kids pull when they’re growing up. 

Another one of my book related obsessions was to do with a huge children’s French English dictionary that my gran had at her house.  It was really lovely because as well as all the words it also had fabulous, full colour illustrations for every word.  My absolute favourite was the illustration for sadness which showed the head of a small girl in hideous paroxysms of tears and woeful mortification.  She really looked distressed, like someone had just told her that not only had her pet kitten died in a tragic accident, but that she had just eaten it in a pie.  It was made more macabre by the fact that it was just her disembodied head showing, floating around in agony.  Very French!

I loved this page, and every time we went to Gran’s house for months on end I would insist on her getting the dictionary down and finding the page so that I could stare at it in rapt fascination.  One day I was looking through the book and had hysterics myself because I thought the page had gone missing, as in the Twinkle Twinkle disaster of 1976.  Turns out that I had merely turned over two pages at the same time, and peace was restored, but not until I had done a passable imitation of the miserable French fille all of my own.

Other weird obsessions that I went through as a child included:

1. Only eating baked beans and yogurt for about three years.
2. Calling baked beans ‘Melvins’
3. Having a comfort blanket like Linus from Peanuts, which I would take everywhere and sniff at.
4. Chewing bits of leather
5. Eating paper and pencil shavings
6. Crying hysterically at the Simon and Garfunkel song Bright Eyes, despite having never seen the film Watership Down
7. Thinking all the dolls in my dolls house came alive when I wasn’t looking and continually trying to find ways of catching them in the act of being ‘alive’.
8. Wearing a tea cosy on my head for several months
9. Sleeping with my favourite shoes on so that I could enjoy them even while I was asleep
10. Being convinced that a Geranium was a type of man eating swimming pool that was going to be the end of me if the wolf didn’t get me first.

There are probably hundreds more, but they are some of the ones that stick in my mind, along with the digging for mice thing I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog.  Still, children have a lot of time on their hands and I think it’s important that they spend their time doing useful things like developing strange death filled fantasies rather than spending their lives in front of a computer screen killing mutant zombies.  We didn’t have a computer until I was nine, and then we only had Pac Man, and look what it did for me…