Sleepeeezeee

I'm writing this blog 'on location' (with a pen and paper, later to be copied into font) from the reception area of my doctor's surgery in Crouch End, hoping that the periodic ringing of telephones and unrelenting soundtrack of the Carpenter's Greatest Hits (we're on I Won't Last A Day Without You now) will inspire me to produce something greater and more interesting than the patter that has littered these webpages in recent months.

There is duplicity in my visit here. I arranged the appointment under the guise of needing more steroid inhalers, as I keep waking up in the night only to encounter a near-death experience as my lungs fluff up and I clutch at the pillows, gasping for breath. This is my official reason for coming. My unofficial reason is to request some more sleeping pills.

I LOVE sleeping pills. The doctor prescribed them for me when I started my PGCE, as the newness and scariness of everything was causing A LOT of sleepless nights.

I'm not addicted or anything. In fact, I have only taken about seven zopiclones in my entire life. But the pure bliss they bring is like a cuddle in a cosy blanket under a thousand stars. You take one at 11pm knowing (there is a very loud, brash Scottish lady lecturing her ghetto fabulous daughter now. It's more off-putting than Karen Carpenter's dulcet tones) that the next conscious breath you take will be when your alarm goes off at 6.30am, and that you will complete the rest of the day without any of the nasty side effects that illegal, herbal or alcoholic substances can cause (the track order on this cd is weird, who puts Yesterday Once More before Calling Occupants of Interplanetery Craft - who?).

Sometimes, for fun, I take a zopiclone at 4pm, and again at 10pm, and I can spend nearly twenty hours asleep. Sometimes life just isn't interesting enough to bother to stay awake.

But, obviously, I am not going to tell my doctor any of this. I am simply going to plant the idea of the sleeping pills into her head, and then let her think that she has come up with the idea herself. And then I am going to skip to the pharmacy and present my prescription like it is a golden ticket.

And, while I'm there, I might as well get some inhalers. IT'S ONLY MY LUNGS.