Insomnia

I work from home but spend a day or two each month in the office, usually timed to fit in with training sessions, wrapping up projects or client meetings. It’s typically quite a relaxed day, a chance to catch up with my colleagues and feel part of the team. The 4-hour round trip to the wilds of Oxfordshire (our office is a converted barn in a village bordering the Cotswolds) is fairly demanding but I’ve worked out a back roads' route that cuts out the horror of the M1 and M40 taking instead me through pretty stone cottage villages and farmland for much of the journey. Not quite so pleasant driven in the dark, when road-hogging 4x4s can be lurking around every dark corner, just waiting to blind you with their bright lights and force you onto the verge...but still not the worst trip in the world (that of course would be any trip involving the aforementioned motorways, with the M25 thrown in for good measure).

For some bizarre (and highly annoying!) reason I can NEVER sleep properly the night before any office trip....I’ll toss and turn all night, snatching a couple of hours at best. Consequently, I feel rubbish the next day and probably shouldn’t be sitting behind the wheel of a car at all, let alone driving the distance I do.

I’ve tried everything to break the once-in-a-while insomnia hell...

Going to bed early, usual time or even later than usual...just varies the amount of time spent wishing I could SLEEP!

Taking a warm bath before bed, a bath early in the evening or not at all....I end up too hot or too cold and AWAKE!

Reading till I feel drowsy....not even the The Big Book of Things To Do With A Broken Elastic Band induces slumber.

Sleeping in the spare room...or B sleeping in the spare room and me in our bed (nothing worse than being the restless fidgety one while your spouse is blissfully snoring away next to you).....but that just creates extra laundry!

Taking rescue remedy and over-the-counter sleeping pills....but I seem to be resistant to their chemical charms and they just make me groggy in the morning!

Cutting down on caffeine...this is something I’ve been trying to do lately anyway, setting a cut-off time of 2pm....but nope, 3am and I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!

Eating a high-carb supper to lull me into lethargy....that just seems to play havoc with my digestion and leaves me feeling like rubbish AND bloated after a restless night.

It’s driving me mad as I don’t function well without sleep....it takes a couple of days to get over every trip to the office and really can’t understand why I am burdened with this ridiculous phenomenon. I now have the deepest sympathy for anyone who suffers long-term insomnia or sleep deprivation.

Insomnia is largely attributed to psychological reasons and typically triggered by stress....but I don’t feel stressed! At least not stressed about work...stressed about not getting to sleep, maybe....but not worried about work!

Would really welcome any suggestions on overcoming this irritating and exhausting habit I'm developing. In the meantime I'm off to catch up on some shut eye....

Race For Life 2009

Well, I did it!

Completed the Race For Life this morning....5 km along the pretty (riverside) part of Bedford. It was a great atmosphere and quite an emotional experience too, remembering how many people are affected by cancer.

Update on my dad:

Fourth chemo cycle done...two more to go this next month then another CT scan to monitor progress. So far he's been doing fine... he's had no dreadful side effects and is carrying on as normal as possible. Long may it continue so!

Love Thy Neighbour?

Not when she starts hoovering at 6am on a Saturday morning!

Or keeps hens that sometimes cluck incessantly for hours on end...usually starting before sun up, around 5am at the moment!

Or has an inconsiderate (and currently unemployed) twentysomething daughter who plays her music at 1000000 decibels in the room that shares the party wall with my 'office' all day and every day!

Or has five darn cats that think my garden is their public convenience!

Or revs his sodding motorbike for about an hour, at "sparrow's fart" on a weekend!

Or takes down the fence panel between us, promising to replace it very soon.....that was TWO years ago!

OK, Narky Nat's 'Noying Neighbours rant over....

At least we know our neighbours by name....we have the odd chat over the fence about the weather, DIY and gardening, we exchange Christmas cards, we let each other know we're going away, we keep an eye out for England's Dumbest Criminals breaking into each other's cars....and we might just notice if one of us didn't appear for months on end.

How well do you know your neighbours? Would you notice if one went missing or died?

Apparently not everyone is that lucky.

Earlier this month, an 89 year-old Edinburgh woman was found dead in her flat five years after she died. Isabella Purve's body was found after a downstairs neighbour reported water dripping through the ceiling. Officers had to fight through piles of unopened mail behind her front door to get into the flat where they discovered her badly decomposed remains. Police believe the woman was never reported missing because her pension and bills were all set up to be paid and debited electronically.

Even worse is the sad story of Hedviga Golik from Croatia (was Yugoslavia). Governments have changed. War erupted and ended. Neighbours had children, and then grandchildren. But Hedviga never left her tiny apartment in Zagred— until her mummified body was carried out last year, 35 years after she died. Her absence was only noted when the other tenants in the building decided to break into her flat and claim the property for themselves.

Yesterday, tens of thousands of Britons got together for outdoor lunch parties up and down the country. The Big Lunch, the idea of Eden Project founder Tim Smit and Paul Twivy, aims to encourage people to get to know their neighbours better, by sharing food, drink and conversation.

A great idea, I think....hope it did something to bring together often estranged communities.

Alfresco Sky

If you were paying attention when reading my last post you'll know that's the new colour of our bedroom walls.

Alfresco sky....isn't sky always al fresco? I suppose Dulux is running out of ways of saying "It's a pale blue".

I take a lot of random photos...most of them I never use....but I was looking through my camera files tonight and realised that I've recently been taking a lot of photos of the sky (al fresco) or at least photos that include a lot of the sky.

Here's a selection.....

Hot air balloon going over our house

Old tree in field

Fields of gold (well, wheat)

Crossing the QE2 bridge

A Lighter Shade of Blue

We've just finished redecorating our bedroom. When we first moved into the house, it looked like this....

Walls - note "grid effect" and picture rail

"Shower cubicle" and cupboard frames

Eeeeekkks!!!

We quickly stripped the pointless (and crooked) picture rails, trashed that dodgy blind, got my dad to make some cupboard doors (the previous owner just had some half-arsed bamboo rollerblinds acting as doors on the frame) and obliterated the walls (coated with some weird varnish-on-paint effort no doubt inspired by "10 Minute Makeover") and everything else with emulsion.

The room was liveable after all that....but we were never really happy with the colour and the finish. It was a couple of shades darker than we'd planned, plus the previous owner had used some weird stain (I suspect kreosote) on the cupboard frames, that soon leeched through the paint we'd used and stained the surrounding areas a nasty, dirty-yellow. Unwisely, we'd painted all the cupboards and doors and well as skirtings with the same emulsion we'd used on the walls....not a good idea, as emulsion is not tough enough to stand the abuse these areas of the room tend to experience, and the paint was soon chipped and damaged. Then earlier this year, we replaced all the radiators in the house, which left the front wall of the bedroom looking patchy and in desperate need of redecoration.

We decided to remove the shower cubicle as we never use the shower (it's piddling and badly plumbed and most likely the source of the stain in the lounge ceiling below that took a lot of paint to hide)...and converted the space into a much-needed storage cupboard.

The walls have been repainted with "Alfresco Sky" silk, with gloss white for the cupboards, doors and skirting.

One Woman's Medicine...

I haven’t had much spare time to blog recently....apart from spending loads of time investigating the October holiday, I’ve also had to complete some assignments from the Slovenian conference workshops (back in May)to achieve accreditation towards a qualification awarded by the European Medical Writers' Association.

Medical writing is a slightly strange profession...it’s not particularly glamorous, but it can be quite rewarding. Sometimes you get to write about new advances in medicine that are really quite exciting and hold the promise of one day putting an end to some of the suffering that illness brings. You also get to see a lot of morbid details...about drugs that don’t work, patients that don’t make it and all about the nasty symptoms and side effects. It’s possible to get quite depressed by this sometimes, but you just have to work through the data and present the evidence.

Some days, I even find humour in things that are not really amusing at all. Recently, I was writing about a study in patients who have suffered a stroke.....the patients were assessed on hospital admission for predicted outcome using a scale of 0 to 6, with 0 being showing no loss of function and 6 being death. How, then, did some patients have a rating of 7? If 6 is death....what is 7....vaporised? Or perhaps reincarnated?

Loads of studies I’ve worked on involve conditions “below the belt”. One, in particular, stands up in my memory....it was for hormone replacement therapy in men with low testosterone levels. Patients frequently complained of “multiple erections” when using the medicine...funny, other men are willing to pay good money for a little blue pill that achieves the same effect.

I also get to read some...er... stimulating articles from very specialised (and highly respectable) medical journals. Who needs ‘Heat’ or ‘Cosmo’, when you could be reading ‘Cough’ or ‘Chest’.... or even ‘Bone’..... and no, I’m not just being "humerus".....

Holiday Plans

My favourite topic....holidays!

B and I had booked a fortnight at Christmas in the Maldives....but with my dad being unwell, we've decided we'd rather be home over the festive season. I'm not too keen on being a 12-hour flight (plus seaplane/speed boat transfer) away from the UK or out of the country with limited communication for 2 weeks. So we'd reached the decision to cancel, and had resigned ourselves to writing off the deposit we'd paid back in January....then realised we could transfer it towards another trip, somewhere closer to home and for just a week.

Ooooooh....where to go? Obviously, we were limited by the destinations offered by our tour operator, who tend to specialise in the sun-n-sea package type of holiday. Still, it was a very enjoyable way to spend quite a few hours, searching their website and deciding where we wanted to go. We considered Greece (Crete or Rhodes), Spain (Menorca, Madeira or the Canaries) and Croatia....but somehow, none held huge appeal. We decided Italy would be a nicer option....having spent a week in Tuscany last July we were keen to explore more of this wonderful country, preferably out of the hectic summer season.

After much deliberation and more time spent reading hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, we reached a decision.......

We will be spending a week in October based in Sorrento...the hotel promises "stunning views" from every room of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius and is apparently well-placed for exploring the Amalfi Coast and for day trips to the Island of Capri and the preserved towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Something lovely to look forward to.....