In the dead of night

I awoke some time in the early hours to hear the woman on the radio saying it was twenty five past the hour. That’s the trouble with the World Service: they never say which hour because everyone’s on a different time clock. Even when they do say what the hour might be, it’s always GMT so, even if you’re in the same country as Greenwich it’s still the wrong time. Radio 4 finishes at 1am and the World Service starts then; except that, according to the World Service, it’s still only midnight GMT. No wonder the nights are so long for us insomniacs.


There was enough light coming through the window to inform me that it wasn’t twenty past three. On the other hand, the shipping forecast wasn’t on the radio so I knew it couldn’t be twenty past five. Ergo…must be twenty past four. Unless you’re on GMT in which case it would’ve been twenty past three all along. How would a person ever get their bearings without Radio 4 and the World Service? They even have the decency to play the national anthem at a time when most folk are prostrate and can’t, therefore, stand up. That would be any time for someone with three tons of plaster on their leg.

It isn’t the plaster that’s contributing to my insomnia; I’ve had years of practice and made quite an art form of the business. The night before the plaster and I became conjoined for instance, I woke to the sounds of scratching and scurrying outside which, for some reason, I decided must be graffiti artists. I crept silently out of the front door hoping to surprise them but it was next door’s skunk doing stuff in its Wendy House in their front garden. I hadn’t heard it for some time and it transpires that he’d escaped for two months, only to be discovered in a neighbour’s garage. That must have been a pleasant treat for the neighbour.

The skunk had done well for itself and had become extremely overweight, somewhat akin to a smelly badger I imagine. I presume it’s on a diet now and spends its nights frantically and noisily searching for spare food or tunnelling its way back to the garage. What’s it doing here anyway screeched my friend. Why isn’t it in the Appalachians skunking around? It’s like the rat we had said daughter number one. But that’s another story which has a happy ending thanks to Gary, her neighbour’s cat.

Back to the bedside radio. You can learn a lot in the dead of night although I prefer to have it turned down sufficiently that I can only hear a drone; otherwise, it gets interesting and I have to stay awake to listen to it. Sundays aren’t so good though. I quite like Bells on Sunday – guess which church we’re at this week – but the rest of it is too discursive and moralistic. Ed Sturton would put anyone in a coma. I love the Shipping Forecast; when we get round to Selsey Bill to Lyme Regis I know I can doze off safe in the knowledge that worse things happen at sea than bags under the eyes.