I turn 44 in a couple of weeks. There is no getting away from it, I am totally middle-aged. Luckily, I still dress like a man half my age and retain a defiantly juvenile personality. Some people might say clinging to my youth in this way only makes a bad situation worse. But to those people I say: your mum makes a bad situation worse.
One symptom of the ageing process that I am unable to defy is a tendency to fall asleep all the time. If I sit down anywhere even remotely comfy for more than five minutes, I am gone. Head rolled back, tongue hanging out the side of my mouth, dribble running down my chin, emitting a grotesque, asthmatic rumble that scares the kids. Only, to be honest, my own kids are depressingly familiar with the whole undignified performance by now. The poor little bastards used to fret and complain when dad lapsed into his noisy coma five minutes into family film night every Friday evening. Now they just shrug in resignation and whack up the volume.
I can’t count how many episodes of Eldorado she ruined, the mad cow
I’m not exaggerating: if I sit down, I fall asleep. I might have been full of vim and energy just seconds beforehand. But that was when I was on my feet. The moment my arse touches a sofa, my eyelids clamp shut and my brain checks out. Sad really. My mum is a narcoleptic, so I had to witness her behaving in a similar way when I was a kid. Only her neurological condition was so bad that she would fall into these weird cataplectic seizures. Her body would spasm, her eyeballs roll back and she would make strained, terrifying grunts. I can’t count how many episodes of Eldorado she ruined, the mad cow. I don’t think I have got the same condition: I just think I get stress and anxiety during the day which my brain takes drastic action against in the evenings by simply switching off.
Anyway, who cares? What’s any of this got to do with you? You read this far hoping for a TV review. Yeah, well I’ve been watching this Dutch crime saga called Black Widow which you can get on 4 On Demand. It’s supposed to be great but I wouldn’t really know because I am watching it in disjointed blocks, interspersed by naps. I’ll watch the first 10 minutes maybe, then I’m gone for half an hour. I wake up for a couple of minutes, by which time the protagonist is lying dead in a driveway, then go back under until my wife wakes me during the final credits. “WHAT HAPPENED?!” I squawk, sitting up abruptly, pretending to not have actually been asleep. “Just go upstairs to bed,” she says in a pitying voice. Is Black Widow worth watching? Well, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of it. But to be honest I could be watching re-runs of Sons And Daughters for all the sense I can make of anything. Anyway, give it a go – I am an increasingly unreliable witness.
