Dom Davis (The Blog)

So Nubbin, or should I say Willow¹ has finally arrived and is now home. They say that this is where you end up being more tired than you have ever been in your life. Its true, i was truly exhausted when I got home last night, but then I had been awake for nearly 40 hours and that alone will do that to you, but this morning I’m positively refreshed. The reason? The Zozo and Willow spent the night downstairs which meant I got my first full uninterrupted nights sleep in… I can’t remember how long. Poor old Zozo hasn’t really slept in 2 days now and, even if she could sleep, has to wake up to feed Willow every few hours.

Anyway, it seems, thus far, that the whole child raising malarkey is easy but I suspect that’s down to The Zozo as she’s a brilliant mum. The hardest thing I’ve had to do so far is to drive us home which, given the amount of sleep I had and the fact that most of the drive home is a boring unlit road, was interesting to say the least. I’m not sure I ever want to drive that tired again, especially not with such precious cargo.

¹ In order to stop this being a blog about my new daughter and a smattering of other things I have created a blog specially for her. So no, I’m not ignoring the new bundle of joy in our life when I post about other rubbish, I’m simply sparing your you’re not interested

The Zozo has started her maternity leave which means, for the first time in a while, we’re getting a whole weekend together. Not only that but we get the whole of next weekend together, and the one after that, and the one after that. In fact we’ll have every weekend together until Nubbin appears, then it will be weekends with the three of us. I suspect there will be less lie ins with a baby about though, so for the next 7 or 8 weekends I think I’ll make the most of them

So for those of you paying attention we recently procured a bird table of epic proportions. As well as providing 5 star dining with two restaurants and pool this leviathan construction had to be able to withstand hurricane force winds. This latter requirement was put to the test last night.

The really astute among you will note the BBC are reporting that the UK has been “battered” by high winds and rain. Now this may or may not be the standard thing of somewhere in the UK getting a battering and there being a bit of wind and drizzle in London thus it’s a country wide problem¹ but Cromer was among the areas getting battered. We’re talking seas so rough that rescues require two lifeboats and a helicopter and winds that were throwing sizeable chunks of tree at my wife at work (something, incidentally, that the planet might want to refrain from doing in the future if it knows what’s good for it). Last night the howling wind and the banging of things not nailed down lead to a poor nights sleep. I had visions of being woken by the Dutch asking if we’d like our bird table back.

This morning we crawled out of bed, cursed the weather and our lack of sleep and then marvelled at the sight of our bird table, intact and exactly where we left it. I am impressed.

¹I always remember one storm where the national news was banging on about how bad it was for the majority of the program, although most of the reports seemed to come from North Yorkshire so the claims of the whole UK being in the grip of the worst storm since whenever were perhaps a bit overstated. The national weather forecast was predicting Armageddon with people in the northern parts of the country warned to stay indoors lest the wind deposit a block of flats on them or the rain flay the skin off their backs. The local Yorkshire news mentioned nothing, the local weather forecast did start with a statement that it might be a bit breezy out there and then went on to quietly forecast rain with more wind because it’s Yorkshire and that kind of thing happens a lot at certain points of the year and unlike London the county doesn’t cease to function in anything harsher than light drizzle

I don’t know about you, but if I get woken in the night one of two things is going to happen. I’m either going to roll over and go to sleep straight away (sometimes not even remembering that I woke up at all according to The Zozo) or I’m awake for hours. There is no middle ground, it’s seconds or hours.

The tipping point seems to be how far my brain gets woken up. Occasionally my computer, which is in the bedroom, decides to wake up from sleep mode for no apparent reason. There is a click as the power supply goes from low power mode to fully on, the fans spin up to full speed for a few seconds before settling down and both monster screens turn on. You know how much light a 30″ TV throws out when you’re watching it? Double that. It ranks pretty low on my all time favourite ways to be woken up at random times but I can get up, put it to sleep and head back to bed and put myself back to sleep without really thinking.

Compare that with being woken by a machine that’s pulled your telephone number randomly out of a hat and forces your brain to actually do something. Still being woken, still having to get out of bed to do something but this time your brain has woken up too. You head back to bead and it suddenly decides were going to go over the points that need to be raised in my next meeting, the fix to my current coding problem…

…and no matter what you try it doesn’t let up until about 5am where it goes “phew, long night, let’s get some really deep sleep”. 90 minutes later and the alarm is letting you know that the extra 7 hours of that deep sleep you really need to face the day isn’t happening.

And it’s the time you need to wake up that dictates when your brain let’s up, not how long it’s been awake for. Don’t need to be up till 8? Fine, I’ll sit here and spin, keeping you awake until 6:30 instead.

As you can guess I didn’t get much sleep last night.