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Up a few times in the night to tend to a vomiting child. Luckily it was my own. Ernie is having a tough weekend. Probably had a bad pint to be fair to him.
Being dragged from deep sleep is the closest I now get to the night terrors I used to experience quite regularly when drinking. I find it hard to get back to sleep and am plagued with intrusive thoughts, though without booze they are not as scary or confusing as the ones I used to have. My brain seems to just fixate on some fairly neutral event from the deep past and even if it’s quite a happy memory it fills with with a very mild sorry. The boozy night terrors were usually about something I couldn’t quite ascertain or understand or the replaying of some incident where I had behaved stupidly or selfishly. The non-booze ones come with a faint fringe of fear, but are weirdly benign. Mostly I seem to think about the girl who sat opposite me in A Level English classes. She’s someone I haven’t seen for approaching forty years and though I liked her (and I think we’d occasionally catch each other’s eye in a flirty way) we were nothing more than friends. I had a girlfriend throughout the sixth form and she was (at least for part of it) going out with a friend of mine. So I don’t know why out of all the people I knew at school she’s the one who bounces into my brain and leaves me with a chill of sadness and the feeling that if I think about her for too long I might slightly lose my mind.
I think maybe it’s just that she had such an archetypal 80s haircut that it’s unsettling to think of her being 55 and having the same dated style, but also the fact that I haven’t seen her since she was 18 so it’s almost impossible to imagine what she would look like now, even in the unlikely event that she has restyled her hair. But maybe she just symbolises the lost opportunities of youth. We probably liked each other, but never said anything due to shyness and other loyalties. But there were loads of girls I felt the same way about and many more who had much more impact on my life. So why her? Why now? Why in the middle of the night? In the cold light of day my connection to her is so gossamer thin as to be meaningless. What’s my brain up to?
Tonight I also seemed to suddenly obsess over another relatively minor incident from over thirty years ago, which again has the faintest of sexual undertones, but is mainly about me being covered in porridge.
But it was when as a keen young student desperate to ingratiate myself with the world of University drama, whilst playing a background role in an ambitious outdoor performance of Doctor Faustus, I agreed to take part in a photoshoot for the play. The director was trying to get an image to drum up trade and I think was hoping to get the image in the proper local papers (indeed it might well have been a proper press photographer). I was playing a gargoyle and for the photoshoot at least (I don’t remember doing it for the play) I was covered in a grey porridgy mixture to make me look like I was made of stone (presumably just wearing pants) and then had to hang out of a window at posh Magdalene College to get the shot. It was very cold and I had slippery hands due to the porridge and have always been uncomfortable with heights. It could have been the end of me in many ways. I am not sure I ever saw the photos or if they were even used. I would imagine they came out looking pretty much like a cold frightened child covered in porridge and about to fall to his death, so probably not.
The thing that was occupying my mind tonight though was the bit where I had to go to the room of an older female student to have a bath to remove the gunk and try to warm me up so I didn’t die of hypothermia. At the time the weird part of this for me was that I ended up naked in someone else’s room (and believe me that didn’t happen much in the first year of University) and the student and her friends being very cool and grown up about it all, and me being faintly embarrassed by the whole thing. Now though I was more struck by the difference of my University experience to these posho public school kids in this ancient college. I was at St Catz where the rooms were tiny modern cubes with a tiny single bed that barely fit one person and a shared bathroom and kitchen on each floor. This young woman had, at least in my memory, a suite of rooms with a free standing bath like you’d get in a posh hotel and glided around as if that was normal and expected. Even at this posh University the gulf between the public school and regular school pupils was huge. Both in terms of what they could expect from accommodation to their attitude to life. I was this cold, embarrassed naked child and she was an assured, confident woman who managed to at least appear to think that this whole experience was normal. I am grateful to her for looking after me and making sure I didn’t die -which is at least a step forwards, I expect 50 years before this some Magdalene students accidentally killing a kid from a comprehensive school wouldn’t have made the papers. I wasn’t doffing my cap but I was prepared to put myself in danger to try and impress the toffs producing the play, who in return would of course, give me absolutely nothing, forget me entirely and probably look down on me for agreeing to debase myself for them. It’s full of metaphorical meaning.
But the point is I am still at a loss to understand why I was haunted by these two memories at 2am today. Haunted by memories that were neither good or bad, but just there. No real indication as to why my brain was replaying them. Maybe it just means my brain is gradually breaking down. Maybe just the yawning chasm of time that has passed since these relatively meaningless experiences is the thing that is hard to cope with.
Once morning came, poorly son and lack of sleep aside, I was back on an even keel and able to carry on celebrating the life of our wonderful monarch. Good Save the Queen. Think of the 90 years of memories that must haunt her nights.
