THE WOOD BETWEEN THE WORLDS

3am. I slid open the conservatory door and stepped barefoot onto the cold tiles. The sky was a murky grey. Rain was spattering and shimmering against the glass roof. I sat in one of the wicker chairs and gulped the cool glass of milk I'd poured myself. My whole body was aching with sleeplessness.

I don't sleep too well sometimes. In fact, a lot of times. I lie twisted in the sheets, hot, scratchy, stuffy, dry, uncomfortable, exhausted. My mind spins through the day like an overactive computer, calculating the parallel realities and working out what would have happened and what should have happened. I get depressed in the darkness as I over-analyse and beat myself up while the night ticks by.

No wonder today (Friday) turned out to be a bit of a downer. I didn't feel like I achieved very much; even the weekly trip to the pub was spent gazing at my shoes while the conversation swung between drunkenness and rugby. I've little experience of either, and from what I remember, both were excruciatingly unpleasant. If I were smarter I would have found something to latch on to and would have humorously twisted the talk to more comfortable ground. I'm not too smart though - especially when I was up until 3am.

Throw tiredness into the mix and everything sinks into a kind of desperate mudslide.

It started at the Engineering Curry Night last night (Thursday). I can't put my finger on exactly what it was that depressed me - perhaps my crushing inability to fit in. I was not at the Sensible End this time. I wasn't really at the Inebriated End either - I was kind of in the middle. This vacuous purgatory of conversational-no-mans-land combines all the fun of missing out on the hilarity at one end, with the the scornful looks and frowning of the other - the worst of both worlds, I suppose. It might also have been the moment when a colleague saw me poking the candle with a bit of dried stick. It caught fire of course, and I blew it out in a pirouette of smoke.

"I thought you were one of the grown-ups," she said, cheekily. I felt my heart twitch with sadness as I instantly translated her description to 'aren't you supposed to be old and boring?' to which there was and still is, no witty reply. Depressing.

Then, when they split the bill equally between 16 people and I was being asked to cough up for more than twice what I had consumed, I wondered whether I should ever come again. I was too tired to argue about it.

I find myself in this social vacuum a lot. It's like the wood-between-the-worlds*. I could jump into any of these parallel universes, these cultures that surround me, but it would always be a struggle to feel like I really fit in. The result is that I appear as a kind of neutral observer, blending boringly into the background, apparently making up the numbers and keeping quiet and shy in the corner. I try to make conversation, to make the situation work for me, but sooner or later it drifts into realms where I can no longer contribute.

I got home from the curry night to find The Intrepids had left a huge teddy bear propped up on the sofa, apparently reading the Property Paper. I take the hint, though, disappointingly, there's not much I can do about it.

So it was I allowed my mind to kick into overdrive and found myself awake in the smallest and coldest of hours, sipping ice-cool milk in a dark conservatory, in the quietness of the wood-between-the-worlds.

I'm really lonely.


*The Wood Between The Worlds appears in The Magician's Nephew, the prelude to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis. The main characters, Digory and Polly, find themselves in the wood, where different worlds stretch out like circular pools between the great trees. From this meta-reality, they could then jump into whichever world they chose.