Is It Just Me…

I can feel a couple of “is it just me, or…” sentences creeping their way into this entry. I’m sure it’s not just me, I probably shouldn’t check, but I’m just making sure. You see, I’m 22 this month and that may seem like an aeon ago to some of you out there but it may also be years away for many. However, I sometimes feel much, much older.

If you are familiar with the BBC TV Series “Grumpy Old Men“ I can confidently say I’d fit right in with its contributors and the show itself. If you’re not familiar with it, I think you’re bright enough folk to work out what it is. Anyway, I even started my own website entitled Grumpy Young Men. It didn’t last particularly long as I briefly explained in my first ever entry on here:

“My last blog was mainly about being grumpy and I ended up becoming grumpy with blogging about being grumpy; so by process of evolution I am combining all my bloggery things in this blog.”

I do get grumpy and irritated about a lot of things, so let’s get to it.

Is it just me or when you go to bed do you always have your most fantastic ideas just as you’re dropping off to sleep? In fact, I’m now irritated by “is it just me” sentences but I’m not going to change them because I’m on a roll now.

Also, is it just me (I can do this without deleting this complete entry!) or if you don’t write down this idea, the most fantastic idea you’ve ever had that could make you millions of pounds, you will, with almost complete certainty, forget it when you wake up the next morning? Oh, you’ll remember you had an idea which was more brilliant than any idea Steve Jobs or Bill Gates ever had…but you won’t remember what it actually was.

Now, sod’s law dictates you’ll remember to write this idea down but you are partially comatose now and ready to fall asleep, which means there will be no writing implements or anything to write on within the 2.5ft radius your slowly-becoming-inoperable arms can cover. This leads you to weigh up whether the idea is worth getting out of bed for. “OF COURSE IT IS!”, screams your mind, so you begrudgingly fall out of bed and rummage around in the darkness for a pen and a piece of paper. This involves knocking over many objects, all of which make sharp, loud noises, and because your hearing has become accustomed to the quiet of the night, all of these sounds are on par with that of mortar fire, heavy arms fire and frag and stun grenades detonating in your inner ear.

Alas, you have the paper, you have the pen, you have the idea written down and you can finally go to sleep. Excellent.

You may wonder why I’m telling you all of this. It’s because the same thing happened to me last night and the same thing has happened to me before. Last night, however, was different. It was different because three hours earlier I had taken two sleeping tablets as I’ve not been sleeping properly lately. This meant that instead of my limbs slowly becoming inoperable, they were, in fact, dead weight. There was no way I was going to get out of that bed. If Kate Beckinsale had walked into the room I’d have said - in slurred, gripped-by-sleeping-tablet speech - “hello Kate! My word, you are…um, yeah, just, just sit down. It’s awfully lovely…” and that’s probably about it.

I was convinced I would remember this idea and I concentrated fully on making sure I’d remember it when I woke up. However, half an hour of dozing later and I had another idea, which was more of a thought, but enough of a thought to push the incredible idea completely out of my brain - not through choice! I had remembered a topic I’d been meaning to blog about. Incidentally, it was about remembering things in the middle of the night, but the situation of seemingly amputated limbs still stood so I vowed to remember it. As you may have noticed, though, I did remember the subject of this blog.

The problem is, that I remembered this after I’d had today’s dose of sleeping tablets (which started to take effect about two paragraphs ago) and I knew there was a passage from a book I have which I would include in this entry. These tablets work rather quickly and I’m not as literarily adept as someone like Stephen Fry who, I’m sure, could whizz through a book before I’ve read the introduction. No, I take a while to read things and as I have no idea where, in the 214 pages, this passage lies, I’m unable to search for it, copy it out and write a meaningful blog entry to accompany it before I’m collapsed, fully clothed, in a heap on my desk, dribbling on my keyboard.

So - and I fear, after re-reading this, I may have inadvertently remembered what was said in the passage and recounted it in a far more colourful fashion - now I’ve got the meaningful entry out of the way, tomorrow I will find the passage and post it here on this blog.

For now though, one must address the need for sleep.

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