Looking forward

One of the things that makes life worth living is having something to look forward to.

In my case:

• My monthly book group
• My weekly class on Early Victorian Britain
• Waking up next to Jenny
• The leaves changing colour as they fall
• Art exhibitions
• Well-written and captivating novels
• Playing CDs
• Chocolate
• The garden coming alive in the spring
• Scrabble

And plenty of other things I can't recall off the top of my head.

I can't imagine how miserable you must be if you have little to look forward to and you're just aimlessly dragging out the days.

My days go so fast I'm astonished to find that another month or another year have somehow sped by.

All those things I'm looking forward to are really eating up the calendar.

Early waking

I gave up on the idea of regular sleeping patterns long ago. They might be regular if you're a child but once you're an adult it's a different story.

The reality is that my body wakes me up any time it feels like it between 4 am and 7 am. I used to fuss and fret about this physical anarchy and wonder why I couldn't control my own body.

Now I've given up trying to fix my sleeping patterns and I just go with the flow. If I wake at 4 am, no problem, I simply make a cup of tea and read for a while.

I never take sleeping pills. They don't work and just make me feel weird.

Believe it or not, I can have a completely coherent conversation with Jenny while I'm asleep, and not remember a word of it the next day.

Going to sleep on the other hand couldn't be easier. I nod off in about ten minutes and that's that - unless I'm away from home somewhere, in which case falling asleep will probably take longer.

Once I'm asleep I sleep pretty soundly. There are no children to wake me, no pets to wake me, little background noise of any sort.

But I never sleep on planes. There's too much going on around me for me to settle down sufficiently.

I used to find it easy to get out of bed in the morning, but that's not so any more. Quite often I don't want to get up at all, I just want to stay in my warm, cosy bed for as long as possible.

Or better still, hibernate until the spring.