Golden Slumbers

I haven’t been sleeping well recently. Not so much because of any existential angst but more because of road works. There are worse kind of road works, where you have guys with drills outside your window between 0700 and 2300. (The worst road works I came across were in Copenhagen where they took the very functional attitude that road works at night don’t impede traffic - so they drilled and poured tarmac between 2200 and 0600 – much to the chagrin of the students in the flats I was staying in, some of whom were doing their finals at the time). So I don’t get the diggers and drillers and spreaders disturbing my sleep – but I do get the overflow. The road next to where I live is the main ring road around the town. It’s not a three-lane highway or anything, but it does carry the lorries from the sand and gravel depot and is the main line in for buses. So every morning for the past five weeks I have had heavy duty lorries pasing by my window at 04.32, followed by a fleet of incoming buses all hitting their air brakes as they slow down for the corner at 05.54 and then hordes of boy racers with their noisy exhausts going off to their jobs in warehouses or wherever at somewhere around 06.23.
Three days ago I saw a sign on the temporary bus stop saying that the bus diversions would finish the following day. I breathed a sigh of relief and thought tomorrow I will sleep properly. I did – until after 10 o‘clock. I didn’t hear the lorries and buses continue to rumble past my door – I had convinced myself that they weren’t there and I caught up on weeks of missing sleep. When I did finally get out the door I realised that the diversion signs were still there. I had believed in something and I made it come true. Yesterday morning I slept as badly as before. Today the road works are finished. After one final Saturday night of having the drunks wake up the geese at c. 0400 I am going to get back to normal sleep patterns again. But its strange to realise how much what we believe conditions what we experience.