Have you ever spent a sleepless night just swearing, aloud?
I’m not sure if this is an exclusive club, but I have now joined it. Of that, I am in no doubt.
Tossing and turning wasn’t even an option, such is the narrowness of this temporary bed that turning is quite a manoeuvre, while the former was considered as it’s long thought to help a man get to sleep, but it would’ve required me to turn, and as I say, that wasn’t really possible in this bed.
I can’t begin to put in writing how uncomfortable this bed is.
How f***ing painful.
Or how cold the back of the flat is. I’m currently down to just 30 togs from my usual 80. It would’ve been 40 or so togs, but I had to pad out the thin mattress with a chunk of my bedding to try and reduce the kick-in my back is currently taking. I’m still struggling with the back, but the impact would’ve been even worse had I not gone down the padding route.
Sleeping, as regularly documented on here, is always a problem for me. More so when sleep is near impossible because a bed is so bad, or when I’m cold. I think there’s a narrow window of about eight weeks a year when I can handle less than 60 togs on a bed.
I should probably have made an attempt to try and doze off a bit earlier. Now my phone management is very good. Aware of the distraction and intrusion of apps I had to download over the last few years for freelance opportunities, not to mention always looking out for stand-up gig opportunities, once the working day is over, the phone goes off for at least four hours a night. I can’t tell you how liberating this is. It’s like being back in the world before 1998.
The problem is that in this post classic-iPod age, I have to listen to podcasts, a near 20-year daily habit, on my phone these days. With all the ads now, I find myself skipping through them if I’m still awake and using the phone in the small hours of the morning, even if all I’m doing is listening to stuff, isn’t going to be conducive to sleep.
I subscribe to so many non-mainstream shows that these days I’m often indecisive about what I listen to and this tends to become a drawn out procedure every night, again involving more screen time. I start to feel like the four hours I’ve had the phone off every evening are being thrown away through this indecision, but the truth is these days, there’s very few podcasts that I actually look forward to listening to.
In the mid to late noughties, I had a bunch I would always look forward to. I knew when they came out, what order I would listen to them in, and it was always a treat. And of course, they were ad free. More importantly, there was no phone. Just what should’ve been the immortal iPod Classic. I still have a couple of classics. Their charge doesn’t hold for long, which is one problem, but the bigger issue was that iTunes, Apple Podcasts, whatever the f*** it calls itself now, became so unwieldy for downloading shows, I just accepted my fate and handed myself over to Spotify. Only, I should add, after a few years with the wonderful and very underrated Player FM, who I only left after the app started playing up.
I’ve managed to find more very obscure live (audio only) Tears for Fears shows from the spring of ’90 as that live 10-strong incarnation of the band entered its final months together. The viewing figures for these are so low that I suspect that’s why there’s no adverts interrupting the playback every few minutes and I was listening to one of these around 04:00hrs as the insomnia entered its exhausting phase.
I’ve even discovered some of their live jam recordings from the troubled ‘Seeds of Love’ production, which make for very interesting listening. You have Orzabal singing the lead on ‘Advice for the Young at Heart’, a song he eventually handed over, rightly, to Smith, who was in danger of not leading on any of the album’s eight songs. The sessions also feature Orzabal singing ‘Rhythm of Life’ which was meant to be on the album but was pulled at the last minute and given to Oleta Adams, arguably the second lead vocalist on SoS. Orzabal went onto produce her first album and features in the video for that track which 30 years, I still enjoy. The sessions too feature one of the great bass players of any age, the fretless bass maestro Pino Palladino, who actually played bass on many of the songs on that album, later replicated live by Smith on the exhaustive world tour that followed. Again, this shows how marginalised Smith had become within the band by then as he watched Orzabal take over the band in his personal life was dealing with a divorce.
Whenever one of my long friendships have tailed off or ended, I always think to myself, without fail, ‘This is what happened to Tears for Fears’.
I must’ve dozed off some time after 0500hrs before getting up a couple of hours later.
I’m about to pop into my local library for a book on the golden age of detection, the inter-war years, by the writer and editor Martin Edwards. I also listened to a couple of interviews with him during the course of this last sleepless night.
The plan after that is a much shorter run, 6k or thereabouts, albeit tackling the worse climb in the park TWICE, and the weed fumes that accompany that particular climb. The potential for grimacing is high on that climb but as bad as it gets, I’m unlikely to reproduce the frustrated swearing I was hurling out through the small hours of the night just gone. I feel f***ing tired.
Then I’m going to pop into see my aunt and uncle. Their arguing should keep me awake before I head into THE café for what I hope is a long and fruitful writing session this afternoon. It should be better given the script hurdle I feel I’ve now overcome earlier this week.
As for the sleeping, I don’t know how I resolve this, ever. Even when I was running half marathon distances, I never felt that helped me to sleep better. I’ve been put on sleep seminars (ironically sleeping through one), had hospital appointments going back to my early teens and nothing works. It’s just been a huge problem for most of my life and the starting point is I find the process of getting to sleep boring and difficult. And once I’m awake, I have to get up. I can’t do the lie-in. I have to get on with the day. I’m not sure I’m one of those carpe diem people. It’s more about I just don’t like being in bed.
Might this all be linked to never having my own bedroom and until I was 17, and actually having to share the one bedroom we had in the bedsit with the entire family? I’ve always suspected my problems can always be traced back to that.
I’ll never stop wondering.
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