16th July 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Snoozing, sleeping and siestas

 

 A couple of hours sleep

This heat is just beginning to get me down. You climb in the car and it’s like an oven. At night you are gasping for air and as for getting anything useful done…well if it’s not done by midday it stands little chance of getting done. Thank God for siestas! The idea of them comes naturally in our family. My father was a newsagent; a job which involved getting up extremely early seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, but which also provided an excellent excuse for a sleep in the afternoon. It was a way of life. We always had an early lunch, which in Yorkshire could be at any time after 11.30 am, though usually around midday. Notice how I use the middle class, southern word “lunch” but in reality for us in Sheffield it was always called “dinner”. We need to be quite clear here in our terms and definitions. “Dinner” was at midday, “tea” was five o’clock and “supper” was something you had just before going to bed and usually involved a sandwich, a piece of cake and a cup of tea. Got it? Well it’s “dinner” we’re talking about here and half way through the meal my mother would announce to my father. “I’ve put the electric blanket on” and off he would disappear for a couple of hour’s sleep. To me as a child it was the most natural sequence in the world. The only indication that he had not slipped out of the front door, instead of beating a retreat upstairs, was his snoring which vibrated around the house and could make the ornaments rattle on the fireplace.

 

Strange domestic routine

Woe betide us if we made a noise or had the television on too loud. Even the telephone was taken off the hook so that any callers, not aware of our strange domestic routine, could not disturb the slumbers of the breadwinner. It’s strange how you take these habits, started in childhood, through the rest of your life. I still think twice before flushing the loo in case it should wake anyone up and I can still climb the stairs without making the slightest sound. It was what my mother used to call, “walking on your eyelashes”. On a Sunday afternoon we were packed off to Sunday School when my mother would also join my father for her snooze of the week. What all seemed so natural at the time seems so strange now with the passing of nearly 50 years.

 

An afternoon sleep

So it wasn’t surprising that it was a habit I took into adult life with comparative ease and lack of embarrassment. At college I would quite often crawl between the sheets, fully clothed for an afternoon sleep and on getting married it didn’t take much effort on my part to persuade my newly acquired wife that a Sunday afternoon sleep was de rigueur in our family, though in all honesty I can’t claim that sleeping was the main idea on my mind.

 

Four o’clock in the morning

Our former churchwarden claims that he can sleep for England but that is certainly not my experience as old age kicks in. I’m getting to that age when I just don’t seem to need as much sleep now as I used to. If I’m stressed or worried about something I can be kicking the bottom of the bed at three o’clock in the morning getting into a state because I can’t sleep. I try not to make a noise but invariably I’m given a firm kick because I’m either fidgeting around too much or yawning too loudly. Being able to turn the light on and read is not a luxury you can indulge in when your partner is snoring contentedly by your side. Oh how the prospect of a cup tea can tantalise at four o’clock in the morning or how elusive the morning light is coming through the curtains. Then on other days I can hardly drag myself around because I’m just so tired. Add to that those late nights out socialising when on the stroke of eleven my bed seems to start calling and one watches the clock finger drag itself round at a snail’s pace.

My wife claims that she has never been so tired in all her life than when she was breast-feeding the children and having to wake up every four hours. Now the children are adults we are usually climbing the stairs to bed as they are heading out to go to a club or bar on the Paseo Maritimo. Sometimes they’ll admit they hate having to wait up so late to go out! And I sometimes suspect they’d rather be going to bed themselves than out on the town. It must be something in their genes that demands they’re in bed by midnight or earlier if possible. 

 

No talking

The ability to sleep has to be one of God’s best gifts. Last year at our Christmas Carol Service our church organist, Conway Jones, who has a lovely deep Welsh voice, read part of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. It’s a piece which always reminds me of a typical Sunday afternoon at my grandmother’s.

 “For Dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding and after dinner the uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept”.

 I used to hate it. We had to sit still and be quiet – no talking, no giggling, no moving around, just a deathly silence as though one was trapped in a morgue. How you wished that everyone would just wake up so that life could resume its normality. A half hour’s sleep stretched endlessly into the next century. Every minute seemed like an hour and every suppressed giggle seemed to make the noise of an avalanche. The sad thing is that it’s now me having a snooze with my feet up and my hands folded across my chest muttering at the children to be quiet or demanding that they turn the television down. Little do they know that in 50 years time they too will be repeating the cycle and presumably yelling at my grandchildren to “keep the noise down”. 

 

Write a prayer

The Bible is full of stories about people falling asleep. Jacob fell asleep using a large stone to rest his head on and had vivid dreams as a result. He dreamed there was a ladder between heaven and earth with angels going up and down it. On another occasion Jesus was fast asleep in the front of a boat, which was out fishing on the Sea of Galilee when a storm blew up and the disciples woke him up because they were frightened by the ferocity of the wind. And there’s another story on the night that Jesus was captured in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was quite disappointed when the disciples all kept dozing off when they should have been keeping watch.  In fact there are dozens of other stories about sleep littered throughout the pages of the Bible.  I suppose that is inevitable when we spend a third of our lives fast asleep. If I should be lucky enough to live until I’m 90 years old I shall have spent thirty years of them hopefully fast asleep…..and probably snoring as well! It seems such a waste of time but I do enjoy it! Perhaps we need somebody to write a prayer thanking God for the ability to sleep and praying that we might be able to sleep on those awful occasions when we just can’t drop off.

 

In fact here’s a tip, if you can’t sleep try lying right at the edge of the bed and then you might just drop off!

 

Father Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Majorca

St Philip & St James

Nunez de Balboa, 6

Son Armadans, Palma

e-mail: anglicanpalma@terra.es

www.anglican-mallorca.org