Bank Holiday

Oh yes, Bank Holidays are when academics do their work. Three hours of preparing work for External Examiners this morning, and tomorrow I shall be up at the call of the cockerel to spend a day data-inputting.
Oh, I remember in Italy!
You could hear the first cockerel wake up and crow in the valley; one by one, the others woke up and followed it.
That woke up the first dog, who barked; and then one by one, the others woke and barked.
The dogs woke the church bells and first one, and then all of them, started chiming.
It was a perfect place to be an insomniac, because you witnessed the glorious sounds of dawn, spaced out across the landscape so that you almost draw a map of where everything was.
I used to lie there and try to work out if the order of awakening was the same every morning.
Was it the same cockerel who started each day, or did they take it in turns?
This afternoon, after the grafting part of the day, I cut a melon in half and went out to sit in the rain, eating it with a spoon straight from the shell. I pretended that I lived in a tropical country- Borneo, or somewhere like that, where a bit of rain simply didn't matter. It was warm, and because it's damp out there, my Celtic hair thought I was in Scotland and fluffed out to a huge Celtfro which makes me look like I'm wearing a wig.
Now, it's the evening and I'm all out of energy for grafting.
It's tea and toast and listening to the clock I bought for upstairs ticking in the kitchen.
It kept me awake one night; I bought it so it would help me to sleep (concentrating on the ticking sometimes helps). But no; I started fixating on the different ticks and wondering whether the hands made different sounds on the way down between twelve and six than they did on the way up, between six and twelve.
Insomnia is full of tricks, and most of the time I just go with it. The worst thing is when you finally get to sleep at 4 a.m. then wake up with such a brilliant idea at six, that you have to wake up and write it down in case you forget it.
However, I feel like an ideas millionaire, and that's loads better than being a money one.