But of course this has a moral.

There is this mattress ad on TV where a bleary-eyed guy is cleaning his car. Then another guy walks up to the car, gets in and drives away, and this fellow is left with the most astonished look on his face because he'd been cleaning someone else's car all along, and then they say, look what happens when you don't sleep well. Then the jingle and the solution are provided.

I laughed like a hyena when I saw it yesterday, I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm usually indifferent to sleep, in the sense that I don't love it excessively because of the trouble it involves. I'm usually very lazy but I'd rather waste time with my eyes open; I can't explain this properly except that being lazy by choice is an art. Like the difference between a slacker and an idler. I can sit down with a book and gaze vacuously out of the window at regular intervals, and yet make the cumulative number of hours spent reading largely productive, because I can pretend I was thinking.

Being a bad sleeper might have a role to play in this too. It takes me time to fall asleep, and I usually wake up immediately if there's a sudden sound, or if a light goes on somewhere, or if it starts raining, or if a car alarm goes off. Not that other people wouldn't wake up if a car alarm went off, I remember having an impassioned conversation with a friend about how you should be able to sue car alarm manufacturers for disrupting peace. But then I live in an area with a local park and a local Youth Club, which, incidentally, is a secret intelligence outfit aimed at annihilating any kind of mental composure I might possess, do not laugh at this. These youths at the club (sorry, I haven't been writing for sometime now) know exactly when I have an exam to take, or a paper to submit, or some other Thing to Do involving intense concentration and hard work and sombre countenance, tm, ergo there is always some kind of musical programme at the aforementioned local park on the night before the day I'm supposed to be tested. The occasion doesn't really matter. A wedding, a festival, a general ice-breaking kind of youth club thingy, all are treated the same. There is always a band with an electrodrum or an octopad, or whatever it is called (shudder number one) that plays popular numbers ending with a flourishing electrodrum/octopad drumroll (shudder number two), and there is always a loudspeaker (shudder number three) that decrees I must listen because I am being made to hear; there are no two ways about it when every other sound becomes peripheral and the world is suddenly a series of synthetic drumbeats. It's sad, somehow, when it strikes you that in a more interesting day and age you'd be in a dark cell being subjected to thumbscrews, and no one would think you whiney if you complained.

But today I slept. I slept all day and for most of the evening. I slept because it didn't seem like there was another way to spend a rainy day. I slept because I'd had enough of seeing busy people and busy roads, and I slept because I was bonding with my inner homebody, and I slept because I felt like it. And it was the happiest day I've spent in ages.

Then again, I had a headache too. But blame that on the youth club.