“I’ve slept 4 hours in the last 48, and none of them in the last 24″ is not a conclusion you ever really particularly want to reach. But it’s even less appealing than usual at 08:00 Monday morning. It certainly doesn’t help build a feeling of heading into the new week with full confidence and enthusiasm.

Granted I require less sleep than most people, and I can usually pull an allnighter without too much trouble the next day, but there are limits. Specifically I don’t like to pull allnighters after only getting 4 hours instead of my usual 6 or so the night before.

The 4 hours was an accident. I was talking with someone on skype and basically just having a fun conversation, and four hours later it turned out to 03:30 when we closed our skype link. Sure the sensible thing would have been to keep a late night conversation (at least on my side of the Atlantic) short, but by the time I’d really noticed the time it was 01:00 and I was starting to get my second wind, which is just about the worst time for me to try to sleep. So I went on until I started feeling sleepy again and then went to bed figuring: “It’s Sunday morning, I can sleep in.”

And I could have slept in, except that I seem to be constitutionally incapable of sleep for very long after 08:00. But still if you usually don’t need much more than 6 hours a night, 4 isn’t a disaster and I felt pretty fit all day yesterday. I didn’t even feel particularly tired in the evening, which may be where the trouble started.

Though I wasn’t particularly tired or exhausted I was somewhat tired when I decided to go to bed at 00:38, a pretty regular time for me to be going to bed. But for some reason I couldn’t get comfortable. I tried one pillow, didn’t like it, tried another pillow, didn’t like it either, tried both pillows at once, decided to give that a go for an hour or so, and still hadn’t moved from “lying there with my eyes closed” to “being unconscious” at 03:00.

So I decided to get up, at 03:00 and have a hot shower to help me relax. I had a hot shower, felt more relaxed, went back to bed around 03:20 and, at 04:40 concluded that feeling more relaxed hadn’t done the trick either. That being the case I decided to give up for the night so I could be sure of being bloody exhausted when the next try comes, about 16 hours from now.

And now I’m off to make my second litre of strong tea for the day, while True Faith by New Order plays for the 25th time today on single track repeat. As I said before I can take not sleeping without too much trouble, but I won’t claim to be wholly unaffected by it.