This Side of the Pond

Wasn’t that a fun bout of flu that’s been making its way round town? I’d almost forgotten about normal coughs and sneezes that don’t have anything to do with a pandemic but, as it turns out, I’d have been fine with them staying away.

The only positive outcome of shivering under a blanket for the better part of a week was that I made an exciting new discovery.

Well, it was new to me, at least.

For the last decade, I’ve worn ear plugs to ensure I get a decent amount of sleep. Once I’m fully under, not even a herd of stampeding buffalo could wake me, but at either end of my sleep cycle I’m as sensitive as the princess was about her pea.

Because my husband quite liked the idea of not having to lie silent and motionless until he was sure I’d dropped off, I took action in the form of little pieces of foam that block out unexpected noise.

Unfortunately, this particular flu had a side effect: it made my face noisy.

Thanks to the cough and the blocked nose, the interior of my head was making endless gurgles and whistles and snuffles. Because I was wearing ear plugs, I was trapping all this inside my personal noise bubble.

There was no escape. It was all I could hear, and it was a succession of the most aggravating sounds I can imagine. I was, quite simply, driving myself insane.

I couldn’t fall asleep because, no matter how rigorously I blew my nose and cleared my throat, the noises would come back before I could make it into dreamland. And as anyone who has shared pillow space with a snorer knows, you eventually end up in a position where every muscle in your body is tensed as you try to force yourself into slumber before the next noise jolts you awake again.

Three days later, my teeth were ground to nubbins, I’d managed maybe a couple of hours of light dozing and I could barely keep my eyes open. I didn’t even want to try, because they only stopped streaming when they were closed. Many a toe was stubbed that day, because I was forced to huddle in a darkened room like a dramatic silver screen starlet who just wants to be alone.

But life doesn’t stop happening just because you get sick, and somebody needed to be covering all the meetings going on that week. I wasn’t going to get better if my body wasn’t getting the sleep it needed to heal, so I needed to find a solution.

And then came my brainwave. Some might say it took me a smidge too long to have this idea, because it’s really quite obvious, but I’d like to remind you that I was about half an hour from hallucinating by this point.

It occurred to me that white noise would solve the problem. I downloaded an app that would allow me to play calming sounds that weren’t enough to keep me awake, but were just loud enough to block out the sort of noises your brain thinks you should be paying attention to.

This, of course, included the noises my face was making.

The app featured a whole range of options, from purring cats to a vacuum cleaner. There’s even blue noise, purple noise and gray noise, though I can’t work out what makes them a particular color.

I grew up by the beach, so naturally I was attracted to one particular sound: gently crashing ocean waves. And it worked – oh, how it worked!

It worked so well that I had trouble adjusting back to the ear plugs, so I decided to keep relying on the ocean for a little while longer. Unfortunately, it would seem the time has come to switch sea foam for regular foam.

I found this out during one of the birthday treats we arranged for mom- and dad-in-law, whose big days fall a week apart: a movie and pizza night. As it turns out, the movie we chose was “Ticket to Paradise”, which is based in Bali.

Almost the entire plot takes place in hotels and homes on the seafront, because the tropical destination where one main character has chosen to elope is an island in Indonesia, surrounded by the bright blue waves of the Indian Ocean and the Bali Sea.

I can’t deny that I found myself pining for the beaches of my own homeland, as meager as our allotment of sunshine seems when compared with Balinese paradise. I enjoyed the movie greatly – you can’t go wrong with the charisma of Julia Roberts and George Clooney.

But when we returned home, I couldn’t stop yawning. I’d finish one yawn, only to start another, and that wasn’t a good thing because it wasn’t going to be bedtime for another few hours and my jaw was starting to ache.

I couldn’t work out what was going on. I’m a night owl, so I usually get my yawning out of the way before breakfast. Why was I acting more tired than after three days with no sleep?

And then it hit me. I’d just spent an hour and 45 minutes watching Hollywood superstars emote from a tropical beach. In the background…the crashing of waves.

Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, it appears I have trained myself to fall asleep the second I hear the ocean. I switched back to ear plugs that very night, lest I can never again set foot on a beach without instantly taking a nap.

It was wonderful while it lasted, but all good things come to an end. Somehow, I don’t think my parents would accept narcolepsy as an excuse for never being able to visit my seaside hometown again.