"That", said the passive aggressive young woman in the purple dressing gown, "Was the worst night's sleep I've had in a long time."
If someone was writing a book about me, that might be how they would start it. If they wanted it to begin with me waking up this morning feeling incredibly grumpy. It would also only be historically accurate if the author noted at some point that I was talking to myself - I was too grumpy to speak to real people until about 11am this morning.
I've had about 3 hours sleep I would wager - my eyes feel like they're full of grit, my brain is not working in logical patterns and I've just about had it with the entire natural and human world.
At about 4am this morning a fox decided to start the Olympic preparations early by hurdling through the backgardens on my street. There are a couple of issues with this fox's plans - the fences between all the gardens on my street are about 6 foot high, and the gardens are all postage stamps - in order to get up enough momentum to leap the fence, the fox is required to do a few laps of the garden to get up to speed.
My neighbour has a gravel garden. Do you have any idea how much racket a turbo-charged fox on a mission can make in a gravel garden at 4am? I'm not a pro-hunt kind of country girl but last night I'd have happily skinned the damn thing and then phoned Naomi Campbell to see if we could hang out while I wore my new best friend as a nappy.
When the fox got into my garden the stupid thing failed to take into account the large bush in one corner of the garden that was disrupting his laps - every time he reached the corner there was a flurry of noise and the thing would pull up short, there'd be a pause and then it kicked off again. Sweet mother of pearl... if I'd known the fox was so desperate to find its garden of choice while I was sleeping I'd have dug the frigging bush up and built the foz a disabled ramp to get it from A to B.
At one point I even considered letting him through the house to the front so that he could make his way down the street unrestricted by evil fence panels.
Once the fox had trotted off I managed to fall back to sleep again until roughly 6am when a woman in one of the houses that backs on to ours started having the loudest foreign argument possible for such a time in the morning. Had the argument been in English I might not have minded - who doesn't like a good hour in bed listening to someone washing their dirty laundry in public? Sadly, I didn't undertsand a word of it. I also couldn't work out whether it would be a good idea to call the police either to protect the lady (who sounded in some distress) or to just gag her.
Do we still have breach of the peace or did that shuffle off with Romeo and Juliet?
By the time the alarm went off my nerves were so fraught and my vision so blurry there's a good chance the author of my book might have described me as a less kempt Tracey Emin, or even worse; a feature from one of her installations.
Surely, there could have been some kind of evolutionary development that said the hotter it gets at night, the quieter everything becomes. Because if you must have your window open, you necessarily need the rest of the world to be quiet a little bit and let you get some shut eye. Is that too much to ask?
I've booked approximately half a train as a result of today's fatigue so if you find yourself halfway to Edinburgh and the loco pulls up short you just give me call and see what I can do to fix this mess. SLEEP.
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