Night Fright!

Do you ever wake in the middle of the night with an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness or anxiety, even downright anguish, a sort of 'existential angst', and, try as you might, you cannot get off to sleep again? Do black thoughts flood into your head and torment you in the blackness of night, in one form or another, effectively banishing further sleep? If this "nocturnal numbness" never happens to you, you're one of the fortunate few, of which alas I am not, in which case you need not read on. But if you're a fellow sufferer, then perhaps the following is more or less familiar to you.

Where am I?

The other night I awoke just after three in the morning in a somewhat confused and anxious state and, try as I might, I could not get back to sleep. It seems I had been having a rather heavy dreamlike experience, not exactly a nightmare, but one that I'd rather have done without and which must have instilled a certain uneasiness and disquiet in my subconscious that looks to have been the reason for my waking up all of a sudden in a state of some anxiety. I had a strange sense of being ethereal, disconnected from the world and out of touch with everyone, as though unable to retrieve my past and re-connect with people and events that had been part of my life.

So there I was, awake, nervous and apprehensive, with a deep sense of abandonment and aloneness (rather than loneliness) that precluded sleep but which demanded stimulation, both visual and auditory if I was to get over it. So what would most people do in such a situation? Turn to drink? Gulp down a few pills? Try and get themselves sexually aroused?Well, I did none of those: I just turned the telly on to good old BBC 24-hour news and sat back to absorb some of the world's goings-on to take me out of myself. And it was the usual merry mixture of civil unrest, terrorist attacks, state-sponsored massacres, natural disasters, gruesome murders, all-consuming arsons, high-level fraud, political scandal, economic chaos, drug wars, widespread deceit and deception and the like. Have I missed anything out? You can fill in the gaps for me. All in all it made a great way for me to forget my own sleep-induced desolation and despair.

Yes, all this misery and mayhem in the world managed to take my mind off my own less tangible fears and envelop me in a general feeling of revulsion at the state of the world which is never free of upheaval and unrest. Half way through my viewing or revulsion, if you prefer, I got up, went down to the kitchen, found some strawberries in the fridge and washed them down with pure orange-juice whilst listening to something silly on the radio. Back upstairs I siphoned the python, as they say (well some of us still do), and so with belly assuaged and bladder emptied, I got back down to calming the mind and the spirit, an enterprise not so easily achieved. It was back to the world news and a further serving of calamities and conflicts, followed by a review of the day's major international sports events. That's where I drew the line and turned the tv set off.

Where am I?

Having set the television screen on a red mood light that allowed me to faintly perceive my surroundings once the main light was off, I settled back down to re-enter the world of sleep. It was now more than an hour later, around 4.30 am, and being summer, it was already beginning to lighten outside and the dawn chorus had struck up: an ideal backdrop for me to drift off. I hate the dead silence and darkness of the night, and the faint glimmer of light and chirping of the birds were a welcome sight and sounds. 

Within a few short minutes I was in the arms of Morpheus, transported back to the land of Nod. With my night fright dispelled and my spirit calmed, I slept soundly, though I knew that it was not an isolated occurrence and was bound to recur soon enough. Fortunately, I had devised an effective means of combating it (thank God for BBC 24-hr news!) and having the remedy made me less frightened of the malady. 

When is a Drought Not a Drought?

That is the question that is exercising my mind at this moment: When is a drought NOT a drought? And the answer? When it's been raining nearly every day for three weeks! At least it's not what we normally understand by the term 'drought'.

Rainy drought conditions!

You see, my friends, ever since the "drought" was made official and a water hosepipe ban was put in place, as well as other restrictions on the use of water, heaven's sluice-gates have opened up and it has rained on us almost every day to some degree or other, which is just as well, really, as our gardens get watered at least during this extreme spell of dry weather!

And believe me, there's nothing worse than a wet drought! A dry drought I know how to deal with, but a wet drought... now that's a different thing altogether and the "rule-book" says nothing about that. How does one begin to tackle a wet drought? The Authorities tell you one thing and your senses witness another. Is the weather just being bloody-minded to wrong-foot meteorologists and hoodwink the rest of us or are we seeing contradiction where there is none?

As rainy conditions stop us from going into the garden to deal with the drought by chucking a few buckets of water over our more precious plants, we see all the vegetation really taking off with all this dry rain falling on us and before we know it we have a jungle to cut down!. What are we to do? Brave the rain to counter the drought or weather the drought and let the rain do its worst? Either way, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't! 

Could this be the future?

And to make matters worse, my confounded brolly gave up the ghost the other day before a sudden powerful gust when I was out and I was left helpless before a possible imminent downpour of drought-induced rain. Fortunately the drought held off till I was back home before unleashing its stores of rain. Now I'm brolly-less and can't find a shop that sells them. Cue to go online at Amazon and get one from there together with a pair of garden secateurs and perhaps a revamped mackintosh and some sort of cat repeller to stop cats pooping in my garden every day!



09.05.2012
It is three days later and the drought continues with more rain every day. Wet boggy ground and mud patches in gardens and parks are visual testimony to the cumulative effects of a watery drought. The hosepipe has become irrelevant as Nature is being kind to us and supplying in abundance what we may not obtain from the water companies. But the special drought restrictions continue and there's no sign yet of their ending. With dry weather like this, umbrella sellers will be doing a rip-roaring trade.

Should a period of real dry weather, not to say drought, come upon us one day soon, we'll need a new word to define it, given that drought now conjures up visions of constant wet and rainy weather! The only viable terms that come to mind at the moment are 'real-drought' or, 'drought-for-real' or better still 'dry-drought'. Yes, the last of these has a certain pleasant alliterative ring to it. We will have 'droughts' that are wet and then 'dry-droughts' that are true periods of dry weather. Bingo! Problem solved! And the English language is the richer for it.

I rest my case and spare the reader's patience.