Jetlag And The Samuel Pepys Of Bristol or "No No No No No No No! No No No! No No No No No!"

Rather an unwieldy title, but it covers most bases.

I’ve always maintained that jetlag doesn’t exist. You just need to stay up until it’s time to go to sleep in your new time zone.

I got back here almost a week ago now and was fine for the first four days or so. I didn’t sleep a wink two nights ago, though. And here I am again at three in the morning, wide awake.

My friend Jonny claimed that he was suffering from “classic jetlag” when he came out here recently. Apparently, that’s the type you get when you fly East, or something. I’m sure he’ll define it more clearly in a comment very soon. But his “classic jetlag” kicked in the next day. Perhaps I’m suffering from “post-classic jetlag” or “neo-classic jetlag” or even “lagged jetlag”.

Anyway, Ella’s not been massively sympathetic. After not sleeping a wink all night and trying to stay up all of the next day, I finally succumbed at about 2pm the following afternoon and went for a two hour nap. Twenty minutes in, Ella came in and said things like, “Are you asleep?” and “Are you tired?” and “Did you forget to go to sleep last night?” and “Open your eye,” whilst forcing my eye open, “Oh, yes, you do look tired,” continuously, for about three minutes or so, all with a rather malevolent expression on her face, until I told her in no uncertain terms that she should leave me alone. She did. Five minutes later, just as I’d dropped off again, her phone alarm that she’d left under a pillow went off. I admitted defeat and got up. To say that she found it hilarious is an understatement.

I wasn’t too cross as she’s been rather ill recently, to say the least, with a tropical fever, so it was good to see her back to her usual self.

The following evening, we watched “Sexy Beast” which, in case you don’t know, is a British gangster film about a guy (Ray Winstone) who has retired from his life of crime to Spain in order to soak up the rays. However, a former associate of his flies over from London to persuade him to do one more job. He’s the kind of guy you can’t say no to, unless you want to be soundly beaten. Ben Kingsley plays this deranged, bad-mouthed psycho. Let’s just say I’ll never be able to watch Gandhi in quite the same light again…

In one scene, Kingsley just shouts the word “No!” at Winstone about 20 times like he’s firing bullets from his mouth or something.

That night, Ella couldn’t sleep (“jetlag by proxy”?) and ended up finally going to sleep at 7 in the morning.

I thought about it at 9am, then again at 10am, then again at 11am, then 11.30, 11.45, 12… by 12.30 I just couldn’t stop myself. I burst into the room, doing my best Ben Kingsley, “No! No! No! No! No!” rat-a-tat-tat.

Hilarious, I thought.

Ella, however, suddenly seemed to have lost her sense of humour. Understandably, as she’d had a bit of a relapse, which was why she couldn’t sleep.

Oops. Another clanger dropped. You should have seen her face, though…

Anyway, Jonny’s quite a funny bloke. He’s the Samuel Pepys of Bristol. He’s kept a diary every day since he was 19, I think, which is over 10 years now. He forces himself to do it every night and hates doing it but it’s like an albatross around his neck now. He can’t possibly stop. He’s not able to explain why. It seems like quite a good idea, though, because it helps him to remember things that he would otherwise have forgotten. It’s very factual and he always uses a special pen.

The other thing about Jonny is that he collects snow globes. Everywhere he goes, he has to get one. He got a particularly tasteful one in Singapore with gold snow falling delicately over the Merlion – Singapore’s national symbol, which, as you may be able to guess, is a cross between a fish and a lion. And Merlion sounds slightly better than Fishlion, I suppose.

Anyway, I asked Jonny about this obsession with snow globes. He said that he’d been building up a collection sporadically for a while, but the obsession really kicked in when he went to Prague and was hunting high and low for one but could only find one for twelve quid. If you’re unfamiliar with snow globe prices, twelve quid is at the very expensive end of the market. He spent days trying to find a cheaper one, but couldn’t. He went back to the shop three times before finally buying it and then, he said, “That was it. I had to keep buying them after that.” Another self-imposed albatross swinging around his collar.

He was only here for a weekend, but we spent a considerable amount of time searching for snow globes and waiting for him to finish writing his diary.

H, his girlfriend, finds this so annoying that she refuses to talk about it, other than to say, “It’s really annoying. I refuse to talk about it.” She also informed me that he checks his alarm clock at least three times before he goes to bed, not to make sure that he’s set it, but to make sure that it hasn’t turned itself off.

Other than that, he’s quite normal really.