sleeping badly

Naturally I didn’t sleep at all well last night. Every little rustle or click or creak, of which there are many in such an old cottage, heralded the approach of something or somebody nasty. The latch on the door rattled a little at some point as if a breeze from somewhere in the house was making the door shudder. I managed to convince myself that I’d left the garden door or the top of the stable door in the kitchen or one of the windows open and I had to get up and creep downstairs with my torch and Dennis’s cricket bat to check. Don’t ask me why I didn’t just put on the lights instead of using the torch. It would have been much easier to see where I was going, not nearly as dangerous on the stairs and not nearly as spooky as it was with only the weak beam of the torch.

 (NB. Must get a new battery)

 (NNB. Remember Village Show on Saturday. Get  some Self-raising flour.)

 I keep the torch at the side of my bed in case we have a power cut. We get lots of power cuts; it’s something to do with being at the end of the line or having a very modern and sensitive fuse box (especially sensitive to spiders), depending who you are talking to. The fuse box lives behind a removable section of wood at the back of the larder cupboard, hidden behind the Weetabix, the Cornflakes, the Quaker Oats and the chocolate-flavoured stuff which I wanted to try but which is really rather nasty, the extra big cake tins that won’t fit elsewhere, a supply of light bulbs, a box of assorted screwdrivers and any spare packets of things like kitchen rolls. (There’s simply nowhere to store things in this house.) All I have to do to get the power back on is to flick a switch, as Dennis showed me, but it’s such a palaver getting everything out first and putting it all back that I dread it happening.  

And, of course, my scary nocturnal journey hadn't been necessary. I had closed and locked up everything before I had gone to bed - in fact, quite early in the evening, whilst there was still some daylight.

Nowadays I prefer the light.

I used to sleep well. I was never this much of a worrier or an insomniac while Dennis was still around.