Not me, of course. Not even the Caped Gooseberry, unless he has a cold.
It’s the cat.
I always knew she was a noisy cat. She has a profound purr which seems like a full-body workout, the way it hurls her back and forth on her chassis with the force required to produce that much noise. And she appears to have the remarkable talent of falling asleep while still purring, which allows her to get her beauty sleep while everyone else is kept awake by the jack-hammer impression.
She does eventually fall so far asleep that the purr shuts down, although you have to be careful about stretching your legs in case she decides to restart the warning buzz to remind you she’s there.
But it is once she’s finally asleep that the real noise starts. Thankfully she’s not a habitual snorer, because you can spend a lot of time lying awake wondering what the noise is before you finally home in on the innocent-looking bundle of fur at the end of the bed.
Could it be the wiring, you ask yourself. Is it the next-door neighbour using power-tools in the small hours? Is there a blowfly trapped in my pillowcase?
I at last realized it was the peacefully snoozing cat, and was then kept awake by trying to render an accurate description in the medium of words. It was such a strange unsnory noise. It sounded – and this is the best analogy I could come up with at that time of night – as though she had swallowed a bee whole and it was now taking advantage of her unconsciousness to attempt an escape.
She doesn’t so much snore, as buzz.
This is still less disturbing than her son, who has a much less vigorous purr, but who has taken to groaning dramatically in his sleep. Like the squeak of a high-pitched door, opening oh-so-slowly, or a tiny teenager being told to clean his room.
He’ll be lying there, totally relaxed, with nothing but a gentle rise and fall to prove he’s actually still in the land of the living, and then suddenly, this eldritch moan. He doesn’t appear to be distressed, or in the grip of a dream (none of those little twitchy paws). He just delivers this drawn-out groan and then carries on sleeping, while everyone stares in his direction.
Not that I can talk, of course. Because I can, and I do, and what with me babbling in my sleep, the cat buzzing and the ‘kitten’ groaning, it’s a miracle the Caped Gooseberry gets any sleep at all.