Snores

Granny is cold, dead-headed, and tired. She has not slept well. She has to confess that she and Beloved have an embarrassing little problem - related to their advanced age no doubt. (Granny is ready to swear that in her case it is, honestly, a relatively new problem; her former bedmate of choice never complained about it, at least.) They both snore. Not every night; but often enough.

Now let's say at once that in neither case are these the full-on harrumphing snores that Granny always visualised as strings of sausages when, as a little girl, she heard them emanating from the aged nanny with whom she and her twin shared their night nursery.

She will digress here, briefly; overtaken by a sense of outrage writing these last few words. That it should have been taken for granted that a woman of at least 60 had no absolute right to private space; that she should have been forced to dress and undress every night and every morning watched covertly by two small girls who ought to have been asleep, but weren't, much too fascinated by their dragon guardian's underwear - the voluminous type, in shades of flesh pink, beige or grey, available from the knicker drawers of the Misses Luckin, who ran the draper shop in the village where they lived. (Ugly Miss Luckin, Granny remembers- Nurse Matilda Miss Luckin; knob nose, crooked spine, hair pulled severely back in a tight knot, always in black, but always obliging, always smiling: arsenic and old lace Miss Luckin, all silver hair and pink and white complexion, who looked like Miss Marple- and did indeed play Miss Marple in local Amateur Dramatic Society productions- but who did not smile always, was rather less obliging, and, unlike the plain Miss Luckin, unlike the old nanny, did not look as if she availed herself of the more unglamorous garments to be found in the tiers of wooden knicker drawers behind the counter over which she ruled.)

Back to snores then; not to the snores that little girl Granny saw as sausages echoing all night long, but to Granny's and Beloved's more decorous variety. Beloved's are a light not unpleasant, tenor rumble. Hers - according to him - consist of a little sigh in and little blow out. Even so, in bed alongside each other they keep each other awake. Since Granny only snores lying on her back, Beloved pokes her. 'Turn over,' he hisses. Obligingly she does so. And in doing so wakes up. He goes back to sleep. It is her turn to lie awake, distracted by his rumblings; after a while she resorts to poking him. He moves a little. His snores stop. He wakes up. And she falls asleep till woken again by 'turn over..' And so it goes on all night sometimes. The only cure is for one or both of them to take the local over-the-counter sleeping pills (they shouldn't be; but this is Spain - or rather the piece of Spain technically outside the EEC, meaning anything goes.) Or else for Beloved to heave himself out of bed and retreat to the bed in his workroom downstairs. Not a solution either of them care for.

He did retreat last night; not much more before dawn this time. So GRANNY IS TIRED. And the sun has gone missing again; and the wind rises. And Norton Antivirus has identified a file at risk and then failed to delete it. So a scan has to be done all over again, slowing down her already slow laptop. Growl.