Monday 14 July 2008

Lagging behind

Well it’s just been over a week since I came back and I am only now starting to get back in to the groove. This is mainly to do with the jet lag I experienced. At first I thought I’d only be affected for one night as I stayed up watching television until 3:30 in the morning and finally falling asleep at 4am. This happened Saturday night then Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday. I watched BBC News so much that during the night that the stories began to loop. I developed a crush on Martine Croxall, the newscaster between the hours of 1am to 5am. She holds her self so well and so professional and from there my crush just flourished. However, the news was becoming repetitive and not even the sophisticated Martine could stop me from changing channels. I switched to BBC 2 which just showed repeats of BBC 1 but with a sign language. I don’t want to watch Holby City at 8pm let alone 2:30am. ITV, have this weird bingo game going on which had an aura of chaotic organisation which made me flick. Channel 5 had baseball, so Channel 4 it was which was showing Big Brother Live. I don’t know why but I just lay there bleary eyed watching these people sit there and talk. Well, they didn’t even do that. The sound of the birds tweeting kept playing as they said something liable and I felt it strangely soothing. So much so that it lulled me to sleep.

The jet lag meant that at work as was more of a zombie than anything else. People would ask how I was doing and all I could do was look up at them and occasionally salivate in acknowledgment. On my journey I wrote a diary and planned to scan it in and post it on the blog. I managed to do the first day but the scanner is at work and I’d have to get in early to scan in the rest. I had the best intentions but I was waking up at 8:20 with a banging headache so have not had time yet to slip down to IT and use the scanner. This annoyed me, and I was determined to beat this jet lag so much I refused to watch Martine Croxall deliver her headlines in such a mellifluous manner and abstained from hearing gibberish from the Big Brother house. Instead I just lay in silence. After half an hour though I couldn’t take it so switched on the radio to BBC 7. Some rather unfunny comedy was playing which started to make me doze. The comedy ended and in its place was a reading from I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, most recently brought into the spotlight for the Will Smith film. The film had a certain void which Carlton may have been able to fill but this was totally different. At first I lay there gently swaying my head in hope it would send me to sleep, when the story began, retold by someone with an old style New York detective agency accent. My attention stirred. As the story developed I realised how much was not included in the film. By now I had my eyes open listening to the story intently until the first excerpt ended. I was wide awake but had been enjoyably entertained.

This pattern has been going on for the last few days now. And I’ve been using the weekend to get ‘proper’ sleep. Each night I’ve been checking out I Am Legend and getting up late for work. You can listen to I Am Legend on the BBC iPlayer if you can be bothered. As for me, I’ve got to break this routine soon or I’ll turn into a vampire myself.

Monday 7 July 2008

Day One