Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) by Nick Spalding Page A

eardrum when I roll over on the pillow, giving me earache.
    Wanking doesn’t help much either.
    It’s supposed to leave you drained and ready for sleep, but all it tends to do is make me sweaty, cross-eyed and still wide awake .
     
    Thankfully, I only go through short periods of insomnia.
    Maybe a month here, a couple of months there - not a constant thing.
    If it was, I’m sure I’d be locked up in an asylum by now, twitching and chasing birds around the asylum garden with a look of hatred on my face.
     
    There are a million and one home made remedies for the condition, none of which work.
    Countless over the counter medicines are available as well that seem to have equal levels of failure. These are different from the home made stuff, because they’re useless and contain lots of horrendous chemicals that won’t help you fall asleep, but will probably make your hair fall out.
    Here’s something I never understand about sleeping pills. Invariably, written somewhere on the box or in the instructions is this:
     
    Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery.
     
    What a fascinatingly redundant thing to put on a bottle of pills designed to make you fall asleep.
    I can’t think of anyone who’s thought:
    ‘Here I am, about to drive this enormous truck through a complicated oil refinery, where the slightest of prangs could lead to an explosion that would wipe out half of Dorset. I think I’ll take a couple of Sleepy-aid pills to keep me going.’
     
    Some of the most terrifying reading you can ever do is to scan the instructions in medicines - even the apparently harmless ones. It’s enough to give anyone a heart attack as you read about possible side effects:
    Nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, diarrhoea, spasms, blindness, deafness, leprosy and rickets.
    …yeah, I think I’ll just put up with the mild head cold actually, it sounds a much safer bet than popping aspirin into my mouth.
    I even saw death described as a side-effect in something.
    Death !? Death isn’t a bloody side-effect!
    How miserable a disease do you have to catch for death to be a more pleasant alternative?
    Between the list of horrifying side-effects and the fact they don’t work, I avoid sleeping remedies like the plague.
    Therefore, I suffer in silence, until the period of stress and insomnia passes and a more normal sleeping routine re-asserts itself.
     
    Without the experience of sleepless nights, I’d really be struggling by this time to write anything coherent. Lucky then that it’s not too much of a trial for me to write through the night - otherwise this book would only qualify as a short story and I’d be half blind from sleep depravation by now.
     
    Sometimes it’s hard to make people appreciate the seriousness of insomnia. Explaining your condition to those who have never experienced it is a real trial. It’s especially difficult when you’re dealing with someone who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat and can’t sympathise at all.
    I’ve had a few conversations with people who think that I’m overdoing it a bit and can’t really be feeling all that bad .
    After all, it’s only a few hours kip I’m missing. I’m not ill or anything, am I?
    Grrrr.
    My wife was always the type of person who could nod off quickly and never appreciated the misery I was in. I’ll give her credit though, she never complained when I paced the floor at four am and never told me to pull myself out of it in a condescending manner.
    That’s the nasty thing about insomnia.
    It’s a psychological condition and there are some people out there who believe all such maladies are easily solved if the sufferer just pulls up their socks and deals with the problem.
    These people need to be roasted slowly at about two hundred degrees and served with new potatoes in my opinion.
     
    If you’re lucky enough to be a sound sleeper and an insomniac crosses your path, try to be as sympathetic as possible and believe them when they say life has become a living hell. If not,