Sunday Night Syndrome

I regularly suffer from insomnia, but it is particularly the case on Sunday nights.  

I have tried white noise, lavender baths, scented candles, breathing techniques, positive thinking, negative thinking, no thinking.  None of it works.  I don't eat late in the evening and avoid drinking alcohol on Sundays but even so, a Sunday night date with insomnia is a regular fixture.  It’s not the worst date I have ever had.  That involved a man who was at least 10 years older than the photo he had posted on the internet dating site and who talked about sex for the entire hour that I spent in his company.  I stayed 55 minutes longer than I should have because I didn't want to seem rude!  I may have insomnia, but I am eternally grateful I am not suffering it lying in bed next to him - that would be taking good manners too far.

I read somewhere years ago that people who didn’t like school sleep badly on Sunday nights.   That would be me.  Obviously my brain has worked out that my schooldays were 34 years ago, my sleep pattern hasn’t.  If I could visualise my sleep pattern, it would be along the lines of 70s flock wallpaper with a psychedelic vomit spatter, and don’t tell me that flock wallpaper is back as if that is a good thing.  

Scientific research, also known as a quick surf on Google, confirms that I am not alone, Sunday Night Syndrome, also called Sunday Night Depression, is apparently common and can last decades.  That has put my tired, agitated mind at rest, so glad I looked into it.  Tonight’s bout of insomnia started with me falling straight to sleep and then waking up 20 minutes later, having had a nightmare.   The instant but very short-lived deep sleep is a new twist.  I presume it is another side effect of the menopause – the gift that just keeps giving and giving.   The bad dream forces me to wake up and then I can’t get back to sleep.

After three hours of trying and failing to sleep, I got up and made a cup of tea.  My insomnia is a few decades past the stage where I wouldn’t touch tea after 4 p.m. because it might disturb my sleep.  When I can sleep, nothing will wake me.  When I can’t sleep, nothing works.  An obvious solution might be sleeping tablets, but do you actually sleep on those or are you just unconscious?  It isn’t a proper sleep so surely when you wake, you feel just as groggy as if you hadn’t slept – without the fun part where you had tea, toast, watched rubbish on the telly and surfed the internet for the house you will buy when you win the Eurolottery.  Online real estate, porn for the middle-aged. 

 

I wonder if I would still have Sunday night insomnia with a surfeit of ready cash and designer homes.  I’m not fooling myself that money makes people happy, I just wonder if it makes them sleepy, but I doubt it.  I now have just over an hour until I need to  get up to go to work, and I can already tell it is going to be a fun Monday.  The insomnia is getting worse so I do need to do something about it, but I would rather not go down the route of medication.   So until I find my cure, I will be here, every Sunday, staring at the ceiling until I succumb to late night / early morning television and its plethora of bad sitcoms. 

  

Dye shy

I am two days away from my next haircut. It is my first haircut in four months and the longest I have gone in 20 years without dyeing my hair to disguise the greying roots.  I think I am now ready to give up the dye.

I was in my early 20s when I noticed my first grey hair. It stood out against my then glossy brown locks like a nun at an X Factor audition. 20 years on, the greying ‘nuns’ on my head outnumber the scantily clad wannabes by about 200 to 1, with the wannabees hidden away at the back of my head, as invisible as many X Factor contestants very quickly become. I have further masked traces of the original dark brown hair by dyeing it all blonde.

It would never have occurred to me that I would go blonde. Having such dark brown hair, the roots would start showing through as I was leaving the hair salon. In 2006 my hair turned blonde after being exposed to an Australian summer.  I was on one of my “career breaks”, which is how I like to think of my frequent bouts of dropping out, I’m not so sure I have a career to take a break from, but calling it that makes it sound like a carefully chosen path, rather than just a need to be free. After a couple of months my hair had lightened so much in the sun that the roots hardly showed. Since then I have dyed it with increasing frequency, the grey battling against the peroxide for its rightful place on my ageing scalp.

I missed my last hair appointment due to illness. I now veer between desperately wanting to get the greying roots covered up and objecting to feeling that I have to. Why do I give in so easily to peer pressure to pretend to be young? It doesn’t change who I am,  it doesn't change my actual age and I doubt it will prolong my life. We have long got used to the idea that men’s looks can be enhanced with age, can’t we be as generous to women? Jamie Lee Curtis looks fantastic, as do Helen Mirren, Glenn Close and Emmy Lou Harris, to name just a few. It isn’t about the colour of your hair, it is about self-confidence.

Several female relatives and friends have suggested that if I have all the colour cut out of my hair and let it be grey, I will ‘look like a lesbian’ because lesbians, as we all know, all look exactly the same and none of them would ever dye their hair.  When I was much younger and had longer, curlier dark brown hair I was frequently chatted up by women.  A friend said she thought that it was because I was quite confident and never referred to myself in terms of a man, I wasn't someone's wife or girlfriend, I was just me.  People thinking I was gay then didn't bother me and it doesn't bother me now, but I do have an issue with society pressuring people to 'look young' particularly if it tied with having to 'look straight'.  Women have struggled for centuries for equality, why are we putting this much pressure on ourselves? We have voting rights, equal pay, access to education, we can choose life partners, we can choose to be alone without the stigma formerly attached to 'old maids'.  Women, in the western world at least, are are no longer sold and traded like goods and chattels, so why in 2015 are we still buying into some Barbie doll influenced stereotype of how women should look? Let’s not kid ourselves that it is only men holding women back, we do a pretty good job ourselves.

I don’t know why others mind so much about me not dyeing my hair. Two years ago, whilst unemployed, I seriously considered removing all my hair and seeing how it grew back.  A male friend suggested I was having a mid-life crisis.  He is seven years younger than me and regularly shaves his head - is having a mid-life crisis?  My mother leads the pack of detractors. She is 78 and still dyes her hair, because “I don’t want to look old”. My cousin warned me that genetically our hair does not grey well, but how would we know? All the women in our family dye until they die. I am really curious to see what colour and condition my own hair will be in. I also think that we need to be more confident in how we really are, by which I mean I need to be more confident and not locked into a never-ending cycle of disguise due to the pressure of both my own overly judgemental stance and the opinions of others. Even whilst I write this, I still feel very nervous about taking this step, but keep telling myself and others that if it 'doesn't work', i.e. if it is really ageing, I will go straight back on the bottle. I want to go grey, but I’m not completely giving up the peroxide safety parachute.  

We're all equal ... until we share Britain First posts on Facebook

One of the great things about Twitter is how it can get information to such a wide audience. This is particularly the case when it comes to missing people and pets. I generally retweet any messages about missing people and lost pets. Because so many people try and help, tweets can continue being shared after the situation has been resolved, so I also try and check that the person or animal is still missing.

Earlier today I was about to retweet a message about a missing dog in Kent, but first checked the owner's Facebook page to see if the animal had been found. They hadn't found him, but my check revealed that the owner has shared posts from Nick Griffin British Unity and Britain First. This made me think twice about sharing the tweet about her lost dog.

Why shouldn't I share the message?  We live in a democracy and, as part of that, have to accept people's right to support the party of their choice. The woman said her young daughter is devastated. Her child doesn't support extreme right wing nationalism, hopefully. The dog - and its fellow pet, left behind by the thieves, definitely don't support any political party, surely the dogs deserve of my pity? I eventually retweet the alert.

I had tried to justify not sharing the tweet, but had failed. I hope the dog has been sold on rather than used as bait for dog fighting. It's new owners may have less extreme voting tendencies. Wherever it has gone, the poor dog will be distressed at being ripped from its home and the other pet will be distressed at losing its mate.

The owner shares extreme right-wing Facebook posts, but that is no excuse for me being narrow-minded.  It really does bother me that people are taken in by the rubbish Britain First spout. In our by-election, they garnered only 52 votes, this is 52 too many, but it was a humiliating result for them. I dislike the way they highjack national news items to gain followers and 'shares'. I started reading their policies, I got to 'Reject and deport all “asylum seekers” who do not originate from countries bordering Britain.' Extreme right wing and terminally stupid – I have to wonder how high that correlation may be.

The constituency the woman lives in has had Conservative MPs for the last 100 years, apart from 1929, when they went wild and elected a Liberal. The current MP has been their MP for 18 years and has a majority of over 17,000.  In the unlikely event that he loses his seat to a Britain First candidate, I have only myself to blame and will probably feel the need to visit Tenterden and rescue the other dog from a life of nationalism.

Swinging from the curtains

Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with a friend.  There was no 'in moderation' about our consumption of alcohol.  I suspected it may lead to a hangover, but thought I was safe, today being Saturday.  Admittedly I was expecting company, my cousin and one daughter, but they weren't coming until lunchtime and I decided that we would have a pub lunch and a wander around Rochester before stopping for tea.

I woke up at 6 a.m.  The room and my head were spinning, I was so glad I had a plan B which would mean I could avoid having to do anything until 11 a.m., and avoid housework until the next day.   I finally surfaced at nine and discovered a previously unseen message from my cousin.  There were now seven of them coming over, including three under-fives. I was not to worry about lunch, she would bring that.  I wasn't worried about lunch, I was worried about them seeing the state of my house.  For the next three hours I cleaned, swept, washed, wiped, hoovered and put away until I thought my head would explode but my house might just about past muster.  

The three under-fives entertained themselves admirably.  Like the rest of our family, they aren't at all shy and had hardly got their coats off before announcing they were going upstairs.  They each have a bedroom full of toys, however seem to prefer their made-up games.  They ‘read’ stories from all the books in the bookcase - who knew Bill Bryson had written about dragons?  They also shared out a large piece of tinsel they found on top of a basket of tools, followed by a quick exploration into the contents of the basket, hastily removed by one of their mothers.  I like to think that a less hungover me may have connected a visit from small children with a need to move lethal objects.    

Their favourite game was going through my wardrobe to entertain us with impromptu fashion parades.  The boys, aged 4 and 3, refused to wear anything they considered too girly or too flowery, so one was decked out in tinsel and the other was in my filthy running shoes.  They chose a handbag each, but only brown or beige handbags would do, after all they were male.   The 4 year old girl tried and discarded quite a few outfits, before deciding that what she really wanted to set off the flowery stilettos and red handbag was the top I was currently wearing.  Three faces looked up at me expectantly.  How could I say no?  I took off the top.  I was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt underneath 'you can keep that on, I don't want your vest!' she told me, generously.  

They rejected either of elderflower cordial or fresh fruit smoothies, but found a bottle of water by my bed, and took it turns to swig from that.  Their mothers were quite concerned as to what might be in the bottle.  I worry that my fondness for gin is giving me a bad reputation.  My mother came over for a couple of hours.  She loves young children, but only when they are at the stage where they sit quietly and don't talk, so she wasn't too put out when we failed to bribe any of the little ones to sit on her knee.  

After a short game of sleeping lions and a few rounds of Simon Says, my guests went home.  Surprisingly it didn't take long to clear up after them, although I was a bit mystified by the bedroom curtains, half pulled down.   It was a lovely afternoon, the children were very entertaining and very, very loud.  My cousin worried about my neighbours, I told her one side are lovely, understanding and have grandchildren of their own and the other side are so ignorant that the louder the children were, the happier I was.

Being childless, I have never had to deal with any of this with a hangover, but it was one of the best hangover cures I have had.  As they left I told them they could stay the night next time.  The 4-year old boy gave me a knowing look, way beyond his years, before telling me 'I know you are just saying that'.  I did mean it though and before their next visit I shall leave any housework until after they have gone and devote my time to making sure scissors and stanley knives are slightly less accessible.  

Sexy data

I was chatting to a colleague about my blog, indulging in a bit of shameless marketing for my witterings during the lunch hour.  I mentioned that I had intended yesterday's blog to be about the use of the word 'sexy' as a meaningless filler word, but that a quick internet search had ended in a vast list of potential porn sites because I hadn’t sufficiently thought through the search terms.

My colleague suggested that I should blog about overuse of the word 'basically'.  She is a former teacher and said any conversation with a teenager involved endless repetition, removing all traces of 'basically' so teachers could understand what the student was trying to say.  This then led us on to a middle-aged discussion of other irritating words and phrases, with basically, sexy, literally, like and 'do you know what I mean' topping the list.

Constant use of these meaningless filler words is not limited to teenagers.  Everybody does it, and I include myself in that.  I have noticed in my blogging how often I use 'however' and am trying to cut down to no more than two per blog post.  A quick search of the internet revealed many blogs on the subject. In 2002, John Mullan writing for The Guardian, noted that 'basically' was 'a key component of so-called "Estuary English".  Gwen Stephens, in her 'The 4 a.m. Writer' blog, rightly terms it a 'sickening excess'.  Her post notes that Michigan's Lake Superior State University publishes an annual list of banished words.  (I wanted to write 'actually publishes a list', but that is another overused filler word.) 'Basically' has appeared several times, 'like' appears once.  It being a US list, although nominations for words are accepted from anywhere, I wasn't surprised that 'know what I mean' didn’t make an appearance, but had expected to see 'literally' in there, but it is yet to sufficiently irritate contributors. 

Sexy didn't make the list either, but now that I have recovered from the attack of the killer porn sites, I have managed to discretely research its overuse.  Even the Harvard Business Review refers to statisticians as the 'sexiest job' of the 21st century.  I am appalled, and not just because my grasp of statistics is insufficient to endow me with a claim on this trade.  It cannot be long before 'sexy' is makes LSSU's list.  I recently witnessed a conversation between two businessmen.  The words to convey just how dull they were have yet to be invented and their topic of conversation was, from what I could gather between the filler words, referring mainly to datasets.  One of them said the word 'sexy' no less than twelve times, without any sense of irony, with his colleague nodding eagerly in agreement.  Datasets and sexy are not two words I would expect to see near each other outside of a Scrabble board. 

I should have interrupted and asked them how data could be termed "sexy".  Since then, I have tried studying spreadsheets of statistics intently.  I didn't feel so much as a mild twinge of flirtation, let alone fully fledged sexual attraction.  I tried increasing the number of digits after the decimal point, lest greater detail should light my fire, but still nothing happened.  Is it me?  Am I numerically frigid?  Or is it that our everyday conversation is now so rife with filler words that people felt a word such as 'sexy' has had to be introduced in a lame attempt to grab listeners' jaded attention.