Woke up last night about four o’clock, feeling profoundly rotten. Sometimes, if I have a sip of water, or a pee, and get my head back down pretty sharpish I’ll slip back off to sleep. But if I allow myself to start thinking as I did last night then I’m basically screwed.
To be fair, half the reason I woke up in the first place was the amount of white wine I’d ingested a few hours earlier. My whole body felt as if it’d had a good, long marinade. It was quite clear that there was no earthly chance of me nodding off again. But I gamely lay there, in the dark, fretting and panicking, for what felt like hours.
*
An old woman went by the window just now, pushing a bicycle which was laden with bags of shopping. She looked like a refugee. There was no way in the world that she’d ever be able to pedal that bicycle, even without the two hundredweight of shopping. It was essentially a sort of zimmer frame with wheels. Anyway, she kept on putting one foot in front of the other and on the whole seemed quite pleased with her progress.