hours and just fallen into bed, the thought of
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dentures and Steradent entirely absent from his mind?
But of course he is right. The frightfully butch military watch with the
special strap and those heavy black numerals is reluctantly put away and
replaced by the Casio, five-alarm model - a dead give-away among the HAART
cognoscenti - and I abandon myself to the tyranny of the pills and bleep.
Calculated to go off at the quietest moment in the theatre, despite dire
warnings in the programme and the evident disgust of those sitting around
me, I can only hope to cut it off before someone complains to management
and I'm ignominiously thrown out. But at least I've remembered to take
the pills.
Then something really weird begins to happen: I wake up in bed with a
start, my head in a whirl, heart beating. "Dear God, I've forgotten
the pills! How on earth could I have done that?" A few moments of
reflection reassure me and I can go back to sleep. "Of course I didn't
forget." Then even more bizarrely I begin to wake up, knowing I've
taken the pills but wondering: "Yes, but what about the other pills?
Other pills? What other pills? Now I'm even inventing the damn things
in order to justify the anxiety. Herein, I realise, lies a special kind
of madness!
In time, of course, the anxiety lessens and sleep, if not entirely untroubled,
settles down to something resembling normality, routine is everything.
Therein, of course,
lies the alternative danger: break the routine and things are forgotten.
