caffeine – Deborah Makarios

“Medicinal rhubarb was commercially grown from 1777 in Oxfordshire. It had been valued as a purgative and laxative for many centuries: a bag of rhubarb was considered sufficiently valuable to have been listed in the will of Marco Polo, and in the mid-nineteenth century the Chinese official Lin Zexu, unaware that it was, by then, a familiar feature of the Victorian vegetable garden, threatened Queen Victoria with a complete ban on the export of rhubarb. His intention was to bring a constipated nation to its knees and thus to end British sales of opium in China.”
from The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia by Frances Wood.

Personally, I wish Lin Zexu had been successful in his quest to stop (or possibly stop up) that giant pusher the British Empire and “eliminate this poison once and for all and to the benefit of all mankind.” You can read more of his letter here. It’s powerful stuff, and even today, there are those to whom it could well be posted.

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I’m having trouble sleeping. (Sleep? Sleep? I couldn’t sleep tonight…)

I could have danced all night – the cinquepace, perhaps, although the mazurka somehow seems more appropriate for midnight dashings – but I am afraid the crashing noises would keep more than myself awake.

The problem isn’t so much that I don’t sleep. The problem is more that my brain doesn’t flick the on/off switch – which is to say the un/conscious switch – until I’ve been lying in bed for an hour or two*. Which is a waste of perfectly good consciousness.

After taking the questionnaire which recommended a 12:30 a.m. bedtime, I had the brainwave of spending that hour or two reading or knitting.

For each solution, a new problem. I have yet to master either reading or knitting in the dark, and keeping the light on kept the Caped Gooseberry awake – and no-one is recommending a 12:30 a.m. bedtime for him.

For each problem, a new solution. I used the candle-lamp of my ancestors, which provides enough light for me to read or knit by, but little enough that the Caped Gooseberry can go to sleep.

And this is where my dastardly brain pulled the ace out of its sleeve: I don’t go to sleep until an hour or two after the light is out.

It doesn’t matter how deliciously sleepy I get with the candlelight flickering on the page, how about-to-lose-consciousness I feel, once I take off my glasses and blow out the candle, my mind knuckles down to the serious business of the night: Think About All The Things!

Well played, brain. The ball is in my court, and… I got nothin’. I already refrain from drinking tea after mid-afternoon, I have a milky drink at 8:30 p.m., turn off things with screens, follow a wind-down routine…
What more can I do? Relight the candle and keep reading? Find a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, books 7-12, aka The Most Boring Thing Ever Written? Send a flock of neural sheep trotting one by one from parietal lobe to occipital lobe?

Do you ever have problems sleeping? What do you do? Do you know of any books more boring than the second half of the Aeneid? Please share below!

*My method of estimating duration of wakefulness without looking at bright cellphone screen for time: take ‘how long it feels I’ve been awake’ and divide by two.

Tag: caffeine

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