Room 101: my five choices

Here are the abominations which I would consign to history

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

I am generally quite a cheery person. Not much gets me down - I am extremely lucky. But if they brought back the BBC show Room 101 and asked me to appear on it, here are the five things I would choose to bin off. And I would put them in a bin smelling strongly of poo, because I am very mature.

Now, these are not the worst things in the world; they are mere annoyances. If Room 101 featured the worst things in the world every week, it would be a dull and very serious show, because the items would always be war, disease, natural disasters, abuse in all its forms and environmental damage - or variations on the same theme.

So, no: except for number 4, my Room 101 choices are quite trivial, or at least, quite particular to my own life. I hope you enjoy them.

1. Hypersomnia

Me and Dad. My parents used to sleep on the floor, because they were weirdos.

As I’m sure you’ve heard me quip: my dad used to sleep so much, I would jokily call him ‘Our father, who art in bed/Robert be thy name.’ He would maybe sleep ten hours a night and another couple during the day. He was a university lecturer, and would fib in his Californian drawl, ‘I’m just gonna do some marking.’ Then he would disappear into my parents’ bedroom with his clipboard under his arm, and a minute later, snores would emanate from the room.

I have inherited his sleep disorder, hypersomnia. Hypersomnia just means any one of several disorders where you sleep too much, though I’ve never been diagnosed with any of these. I don’t have narcolepsy and fall asleep face-down in my minestrone soup, getting noodles all over my nose - it’s nothing that dramatic (plus I hate minestrone soup). I just sleep 10 hours and 15 minutes a night on average, according to my phone.

I mean, as heritable diseases go, it could be worse: I could have inherited my dad’s personality disorder instead. His rages, his violence and his year-long silences would all have been much more harmful to others. And harmful to me, too - I reckon my dad died from a stroke at 78 because all that anger had built up too much pressure in his brain (I concede that this may not be the correct medical terminology, but you know what I mean).

If you have to have a chronic health condition, hypersomnia is probably one of the best. Sure, you’ll probably die early, but hypersomnia isn’t debilitating or painful. Quite the opposite: sleep is a delicious thing.

However, my beef with it is that it wipes out so much time: time I could spend with my daughter, time I could spend writing stories and songs and poems, time I could spend exercising or cleaning the house or messaging friends.

Imagine if I ‘only’ slept for 7 hours 15 minutes a night on average: I’d get an extra three hours a day of life, or 46 days a year, or ten extra years of life over a lifetime. 10 extra years! And it’d be even more than that, because hypersomnia shortens your lifespan (they don’t know why, but it does).

I’ve been to the doctor maybe six times in adulthood to tell them about it, and they do loads of tests, and come up with nothing. Advances in medical science had better give me those ten years back and more, that’s all I can say.

Grrrr. Hypersomnia can get in the bin.