Midsummer reflections

As midsummer approaches, it is only dark - really, really dark - for a couple of hours at night. It's half past two now, but by three it will be growing light and the birds will be singing.

My mother thinks that when I wake in the night, I ought to stay in bed. Perhaps I should. But after an hour and a half of staying motionless, hoping sleep will re-claim me, bed becomes a place I don't want to be and I think that the only sane thing to do is be elsewhere.

When I come down here and I turn on the computer, I never know what I'm going to write. But something always comes, so there's obviously enough going round in my head to convert to the page. In a way, writing's always saved me; been my redemption. Even when I was very small, I vividly remember seeking refuge with either with a book or a notepad when I was feeling unhappy about something. I watch Maya now, aged four, earnestly doing her 'notepadding' as she calls it and I wonder if writing will one day prove as cathartic for her as it is for me.

Having said that something always comes, I have to say that right now I don't know what I want to write about at all. I just want to be down here for a little while and then go back to bed. Tomorrow - today, I mean - I have my appointment at the London Insomnia Clinic. It's pretty funny really, the thought that Dr Meadows will find this zombie woman in his office, looking and feeling like death warmed up. I guess he's seen it many, many times before, but even in my condition I think it helps to see the comic side of this, almost a caricature of a sorely sleep deprived woman dragging herself up a street towards a clinic for insomniacs before she collapses into sleep on the doorstep and nobody can rouse her for Adam.

I'm re-reading a book I wrote for Andy six years ago (I've mentioned this book before), exactly six years on from the day I wrote the entry. Yesterday's entry I wrote out a list that we'd made in Guatemala originally, saying all the things we wanted to do together one day. I was surprised that one of the things I wrote was 'have babies together' - surprised I suppose because I wrote this after only really being in one another's company for a few weeks. But that's certainty for you; that's love. We were completely unaware those six years ago as I scribbled out those pages down in Brighton what was coming for us. How much joy we had ahead of us and, on the flipside, how much pain. I never thought it possible to fit such extreme intensity of emotion into married life in such relatively few years.

Anyway, enough is enough is enough. I could go on like this all night, writing about the disparate thoughts that pop into my head. But I won't. I'll head back to a place which now, after a break away, feels more welcome.