Neighbours, butterflies, zombies and baby elephants...
One of the great ironies of chronic fatigue syndrome is how hard it is to sleep. I know, I know, it’s truly ridiculous isn’t it that a disability which renders you a perpetual zombie (actually I think zombies may have more energy, certainly in many movies they seem to sprint in a decidedly energetic fashion) also means you struggle to sleep
Sometimes I like to think of sleep for us chronic fatiguers as being akin to trying to catch a butterly. You prepare yourself well with a net (eye mask/ear plugs/black out blind/sleep spray/weighted blanket…) and try and creep up ever so sneakily on the butterfly (sleep, obvs) just for it to flitter flutter off at the last moment leaving you tooled up and frustrated.
I, like so many other people, am mindful of my sleep routine/regime/hygiene - but there is one thing I absolutely can’t control; my neighbours. I live in a basement flat and when I say there is more soundproofing in a cereal box I am not joking. There is none, nada, zero, zilch - I can not only hear my upstairs neighbours apparently exercising their clog wearing baby elephants, but I can hear them conversing, watching TV, belching, snoring, and yes, in flagrante delicto.
I’m not entirely sure when this building was converted into flats but I can tell you that I have lived in plenty of un-converted old buildings where there is less sound transmission through floors. This place would be great for a spy ring.
Thankfully my upstairs neighbours do not live there permanently. Instead their flat is a pied a terre used when they have work in London. Which you’d think is a good thing - but, and bear with me here, I think there is a flip side to this.
If you live in London and live in a shared building you are aware of the fact that you are living quite literally cheek by jowl with 10 million other people. So you adapt. If you are a vaguely decent human being you consider the noise you make in your home and ponder whether this might disturb your neighbours. We live with other people’s noise every day and since there are not constant tales of neighbours murdering one another due to poor sound proofing I assume that most people mitigate their noise.
My neighbours spend 80% of their time living in the countryside in big, detached houses - they do not have to live amongst millions and I think are thus unversed in the etiquette of flat living in the metropolis. If you have a laminate floor it would seem fairly obvious not to traipse around it in work boots if you are built like a rugby player who has gone to seed and developed a love for artisanal pies. Similarly you might reconsider speaking at the top of your voice in the middle of the night. Or taking multiple middle of the night showers…
Possibly my expectations are too high. Or more likely as someone who has for years and years and years been disturbed by my neighbours and thus tries to make less noise than a ghost (ergo if I go to the loo in the night I do not flush so as not to have noisy plumbing disturbing other dwellers) and who also chases sleep like an elusive but much prized butterfly I am finely tuned to minimise my noise while being exceedingly frustrated by other people’s.
And so here we are. I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour, not super early, not super late - and was just starting to drift off (stealthily approaching the butterfly) when my upstairs neighbours, or their friends, or family or whoever is using their flat this Saturday night - come traipsing in at midnight and proceed to make more noise than a baby elephant clogging.
Sleep was scared off and now an hour later I am wide awake, exhausted, but wide awake. Which is a conundrum of a state I often find myself in in the middle of the night. With nothing I can usefully do and again, another irony here, being super quiet (ie not putting TV on, nor engaging in DIY, a spot of moonlight gardening etc) because I don’t want to disturb my neighbours.
Honestly you couldn’t make it up.
I think I’ll go back to bed and count clogging baby elephants.