on edge

I keep waking up at five and being unable to get back to sleep. Consequently I am tired, nerves jangled. When I got in drunk on Saturday night and discovered a bottle of Vaseline skin moisturizing lotion on the floor of my room I immediately became paranoid and lay awake wondering why someone would creep into my room and leave that there. Were they making a comment on my sexuality? (The Vaseline thing.) Or were they insinuating that I had ‘dry and sensitive skin’? It hardly improved my mood when I was woken up (for the eighth or ninth time) by what sounded like stones being thrown against my window. When I looked, there was only a solitary magpie, chuckling to itself on the roof. I’m superstitious about magpies anyway, but this was taking the piss.

When I got up Dave explained that Nicki Hunt had left the skin lotion there by accident after applying the stuff using my mirror (the only substantial one in the house). I remain paranoid, however, because she has supposedly left ‘other things’ in my room, things which I can’t see, but which I’m worried will creep up on me in the night.

I’d been out on a work leaving do. Alex, the manager’s daughter, is going to Honduras to ‘recruit fish’. For what? I never got round to finding out. I don’t really want to find out - better to give the imagination free reign. (In the leaving card, I saluted her wisdom in going to live under the sea: ‘If I could grow gills I’d do the same.’). Paul, rambling wildly as ever tonight, talked about killer dolphins with laser beams fitted to their heads, supposedly escaped from U.S. military research centres during the flooding in New Orleans. (That’s the Guardian for you.) We ate in le Tasca, gamely plodding through the Spanish names of the dishes only for the waitress to interrupt us with: ‘The salmon, yeah?’ We actually had a fluent Spanish speaker with us (not eating). We should have got him to order all the food. It would have been worth it to see the look of bewilderment on the (very Essex) waitress’ face.