Waves of hysteria

A long nap on the sofa in the evening can mean a restless start to the night with all kinds of dark places for a soul to go to. But sometimes, when it's very still, when all the neighbours and neighbourhood creatures are sleeping and my bedroom window's open...I can hear the waves breaking on the beach. What a treat is that! Definitely my first happy thought of the day at around oh one hundred hours.

That's reminded me of a memory that makes me smile. So it can be No 2 for the day! One night I was reading a totally gripping book from the library about a man who kept slipping backwards and forwards in his life. It was written many years before The Time Traveller's Wife and, I think, much better. In fact, long before the internet and Amazon were a way of life I travelled the rural Welsh county I lived in to find a bookshop that would trawl the world to find a second hand copy of this out of print gem for me and paid a good deal more than I'd normally have paid for a new one! That good!

Anyway I could not stop reading it...I just had to carry on to the end before I finally switched off the bedside light and settled down to sleep. My last thought before I drifted off was that I must tell my then best friend next day so she could read it too. But then I was wide awake again! What if I died in the night and didn't get a chance to tell her and she missed out on the wonderful experience I'd just had? Hastily I turned on the light again and found something to write on and scrawled 'Please read this' on a scrap of paper and settled down again. But then, just as sleep over took me another thought popped into my head...If I did die in the night then in all the kerfuffle afterwards a scrap of paper saying 'Please read this' would either get lost altogether or separated from the book and misconstrued as some kind of cryptic clue in the investigation of my sudden demise. So I had to turn on the light again and write a proper note naming the friend and naming the book before I could finally get some rest.

I love this story! I love remembering my amiably batty self from twenty odd years ago. I no longer have the friend, I no longer have the book as some other friend borrowed it and wandered off. But I have the memory, safe and close and constant to make me smile again.