From the ovine to the ridiculous

I am not a clip poster, honest. This one is for all New Zealanders who know how talented sheep are. For one thing, they assist us with insomnia. Did you know they have a spot of Busby Berkeley about them too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw

Hello, Possums

Another difference between Kiwis and Aussies is that we kill possums but in Australia they are protected. In suburban Hawthorn, and all over suburban Melbourne, possums territorially have their patch that they patrol at 3 am. You can’t walk through the English –looking Fitzroy Gardens at midnight as the possums who infest the beautiful trees will land on you mistaking you for a mulberry and, legend has it, sink their talons into your hairstyle. They skit along the power lines, tap dance on the roof, shriek like escapees from the NZ Labour Party Conference or Heath Ledger in ‘The Dark Knight’, and try to get into your roof. They scratch in a fingers-on-blackboard way. And you can’t put out rat poison for them. In the yellow pages, there are hundreds of people called ‘Pete the Possum Trapper’ or ‘Tom the Possum Manager’. They get $180 a visit. They are the towies of Melbourne and they own mansions in Toorak. The neighbours have an owl with glow-eyes on their roof to intimidate the possum. We have sprayed a chemical that smells like fox urine on the fences (foxes being possum’s natural worst enemy). We also leave on fairy lights left over from Christmas as possums hate fairy lights. The trouble is it makes them shriek demonishly. There are times when I imagine telling the officer over a possum corpse, ‘yes, officer, but in New Zealand possums are pests and we cull them’.

Sleepless in Hawthorn

The city of sleeplessness as it is currently known is due to the 37 degree nights, sometimes down to as low as 25. You lie naked on a sheet and sweat and try to pass out. A week ago I had the chance to go for a polysomnographic test: you lie in a hospital bed covered with nodes and attached to a machine called an electroencephalogram. Medusa-like, you have them emanating from your hair and forehead, attached by a solid goo that you need to remove with something stronger than Schwartzkopf shampoo. They are on your legs, arms, shoulders, back and you have two sets of pipes up your nose. Then you have to sleep. The machine records your patterns on seismic paper. It lets you know if you have sleep apnoea, restless legs syndrome, teeth grinding syndrome or other nasty non-sleep behaviours. I knew I had none really, just a brain that does not slip easily into theta and alpha mode and gets stuck on ‘desynchronous’ theta waves.

Theta waves recur whenever you are woken up by noises – the worst being the blaring stereo, such a massive problem endemic to Auckland and Christchurch due to extremely weak and toothless noise enforcement bylaws and inadequate, even perfunctory, policing. If there’s one reason why I left NZ, this was actually it, the proverbial last straw. The Herald blares that Christchurch’s boy racers are the ‘noisiest in the country’ (31 Jan 09) but what action comes from measuring decibel levels? And why are people mocking the Mayor, who is being harassed for speaking against these noisy felons? (Read Kerre Woodham, who even transcribes some of the language known as ‘Boyracer-ese’, a derivative of ‘Gangsta-ese’, so this is a linguistically fascinating satire: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10555601).

I believe that sleep deprivation could be a good defence for tampering with the cars of boy racers or at the very least pouring sugar into their tanks.

As it happened, the noise of the air conditioning in the hospital is proving too much for me. The decibel reader in the hospital room shows me that there is a permanent white noise in the sleep lab of 42 decibels, rising to 52 every time the air conditioner ‘explodes’ as it does ritually every 5 minutes. In addition, luxury apartments are being built on the site beside the sleep lab, and the concrete saws are out and about at 6 am. I did point out that it was ironic that a sleep lab felt like it was positioned in a war zone. But the scientists said that from their point of view they would at least get consistent readings from patients. I pointed out that any findings about sleep patterns were likely to be invalidated by the surroundings they provided. I’m not sure if they will ask me back.

In my case, for me, the seismographs show there is never any delta sleep, which is the stuff you need to function. There was only REM sleep on one of the two nights and then fitfully. I remember dreaming about Kosovo and Boy Racers. Noise coupled with restlessness due to overwork = chronic insomnia. Further, I am unapologetically a natural early riser. It’s the only time to work in quiet. The sleep doctor told me that ‘normal’ people waste the last two or so hours of sleep time in bed when they’re actually not really having any useful sleep, just believing they are making up to 8 hours. That sleep you get when you ‘sleep in’ is purely indulgence, not biological necessity. I’ve always known this and got up at the crack of dawn after any delta and REM states may have passed. The usual requirements are set—do yoga and meditation and bio-feedback and don’t work too many hours out of work hours. This is not so easy when you finish a day exhausted from lack of sleep so I try to incorporate the principles into my day. I did attend a Bikram yoga class (all yoga in Melbourne is automatically Bikram) but could not conceptualise the human origami on show in time.

My conclusion is that bringing in the death penalty for use of car stereos between midnight and 4 am is the only reasonable, scientifically-compatible solution. China would give it for lesser transgressions.