Bedtime Is Blissful...

There was a time...in the dim and distant past...when I could stay up until midnight without a bother.

Reading perhaps or watching a film on television...then in the latter part of our working years we'd often need to go to meetings held in towns miles away so we'd be late coming home.

But now it's a quite different story. By eight in the evening I really need to lie down... this minute, if at all possible. Himself hears me sigh and sees me sort of wriggling about and makes up my bed on the settee...the sheer bliss of plenty of plump pillows and warm blankets.

A good book on my Kindle...one or both of the kittens lying beside me and Himself puttering away on his laptop or engrossed in a crossword...he reads out clues and I give him the answers which he invariably says are wrong...until a few minutes later when he says the word will fit now 'cos he had two down mis-spelt...

Just as I reach an exciting paragraph where the guilty party will be revealed... Himself brings me a cup of tea and the hot-water bottle and wants to change the water in my oxygen machine and asks do I remember Joe Brown and is he dead...I have my finger poised over the last word I read and the Kindle decides to turn the page and I tell him to Google Joe Brown and while he's there look for Heinz...see what happened to him, but he looks Marty Wilde up instead so I'm none the wiser...

Sometimes I go to sleep long before ten o'clock, which is a pain because I have to use my nebuliser then...it all action for half-an hour while Himself sets the nebuliser up and puts the kittens in the bathroom for the night...dogs outside for their last pee...checks the big gate is locked and the back door firmly bolted. All the plugs pulled out and a bedtime cup of tea...when it's cold and miserable outside I have hot chocolate and dash of Bushmills...

Himself is mean over the Whiskey mind you...a dash really is a dash and I have to ask for a little more please...

The dogs wander in...Bobby slides under the bed...Eilis has to be lifted onto the end of the settee where she snuffles and blows and emits foul smelling bottom burps all night...Millie clambers into the antique baby cradle at the end of the bed...she's slept in there ever since she came to us.

The oxygen machine works away...the sky through the window is full of stars and the occasional satellite...our little cottage is warm and safe.