Limbo-land

It is 4am. I have been awake since 12.45. I have had just two hours of sleep. Jet lag is a bitch. Correction: jet lag combined with a head-hurty, sore-throaty, nose-runny cold is the real bitch. I’m in this weird limbo-like nether-world, somewhere between night and day, sleep and wake. My eyes sting, my head is floating... what time is it? 4.30am. It has taken me half an hour just to write those few sentences. I can’t sleep, yet I’m not fully conscious either. This has to be the worst jet lag I have ever had. Thirty hours of travelling will do that to you, I suppose. We left Solihull at 7am on Monday and arrived back at the house in Karratha at 7.15 pm on Tuesday, essentially losing two days of our lives to cars, planes and airports. My mind and body just can’t quite catch up with where I am now. On these long-distance, constant time-zone changing flights, time becomes meaningless, mealtimes confusing – drinking wine when my body is sure it is early morning (not that that is the first time that’s happened to me), eating a fish curry when my mind is telling me that I should be spooning cereal into my mouth. I tried to sleep during the hours that it was night-time in Karratha, but my body fought it, desperately persuading me that I was in fact trying to nap in the middle of the day – I never was much good at kips.


What made this journey even worse was that the further round the world we flew, the more my cold intensified. It started off with just a couple of sneezes back in Solihull, progressed to a mild sore throat, then the eyes started to become heavy, the headaches began soon after, and eventually I felt totally rotten. Right now it is just about as bad as it can get and all I want to do is curl up in bed and sleep it off but I can’t. I know that all that will happen is that I will become more and more frustrated as sleep continues to allude me. The clock will click away the minutes and I will watch with weary resignation as light gradually begins to creep into the bedroom and the day begins without me having fallen back to sleep. They say Margaret Thatcher flourished on just four hours sleep a night – I’m going to have to see if I can merely survive on half that amount.