Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. Anthony Burgess


The other night I had an awful night's sleep. Actually, if I had had ANY sleep, I am sure it would have been fine. But the near presence of a snorer, and my own infernal racing thoughts, I had difficulty finding sleep. So I left the comfort of my bed and began television channel surfing.

In normal waking hours, I am not much of a TV watcher. I have one or two favourite programmes, but other than that, the television world slips me by. So being confronted with the wealth of choices available at 4am, was a whole new world.

I began with discounting the channels that do not transmit at night, then moved onto a curious old movie set in the age of the "beat" generation where everyone smoked profusely and used the word "cat" to refer to each other. Trying to keep up with the lingo required more concentration than I was able to muster.

I then moved on to the preaching evangelist. Thank goodness since the age of Tammy-Faye Bakker has passed, the women who spout religious rhetoric have at least learnt to control their use of mascara and fake eye-lashes. Although, bad makeup would have been a distraction from her version of the gospel. She declared that anything that you want in life you can have, not by working for it, but by simply sitting back and asking God for it. I moved on from this station.

Then I got the ever-faithful infomercial (or as Bert puts it "advertorial") advertising the wonderful knives that can slice through plasterboard and then do your tomatoes. The enthusiasm of the demonstrators is amazing. You would think that they had just discovered the cure for world hunger and declared peace.

I decided that hopefully entertainment awaited me on my last free-to-air television choice. It was "Meet the Press", US version, talking about the current election. As I changed channel to this show, a gentleman began his opinion on the election candidates. He began with a comment on how although "we" are not any safer since 9/11, Bush was right in going to war in Iraq. I will try to leave political commentary out of my blog, but can I say that W is a fool, and watching someone defend him in the wee hours of my most desired sleep hours was too much to bear.

So I quickly returned to the knives. They really are great.