Alright, I was grumpy yesterday. It always makes me go on about punctuation or rant about something or other, and anyway the heat had kept me awake for most of the night.
I had indigestion too. At about 2am I thought I was dying from some horrible disease crushing me from the inside. It was like trying to go to sleep in a vice made out of stuffy blankets.
It wasn't terminal though, of course. It was Spaghetti Bolognese and Belgian Chocolate Doughnuts swirling around. A wander through the garden in my dressing gown and a cool glass of milk and I was straightened out and yawning.
It was still hot though. The pillows felt like shredded wheat scraping the side of my face. Meanwhile the duvet got twisted up and ridiculous and my arms were apparently everywhere. Then a beetle flew in front of my face and made me jump up and switch the lamp on. You should have seen it - it was gigantic, you could see its little mandibles twitching and its shiny black wings buzzing on its back.
At some ridiculous time, just after I'd tried working out how many seconds I've been alive for, a cat squealed outside and the security lamp blinked on. I heard the beetle buzzing with excitement somewhere in the room.
Normally, the undersides of the pillows are beautifully cool. You can slip a hand in under your cradled head, or flip it upside down to experience that universal refreshment of a cold pillow.
Not in a heatwave though. In a heatwave, everything's hot and flipping the pillows upside down is annoyingly uncomfortable and utterly pointless. At one point I just punched it until it squished into a fist-shaped crater.
What's more, the sun actually had the barefaced audacity to start popping up over the horizon. Sunrise was unfeasibly early and as the curtains grew lighter and the birds started tweeting, I pulled a shredded wheat over my head and groaned.
Moments later, I opened my eyes and it was twenty past eight and I had about ten minutes to get to work.
It's no wonder I got stroppy about punctuation. Sorry about that. While I believe that one exclamation mark is more powerful than two, and that three or more should be reserved only for some sort of universal apocalypse, I also believe that if you want to make a point about something exciting or important, then you should be able to do it however you choose, and definitely without some bleary-eyed insomniac trying to correct you after a sleepless night.
No comments:
Post a Comment