The things you think about at 4am

I don't have any children. Hopefully, one day, I will be able to afford to have them. By that, I mean the expense of taking care of a child, not buying them online from an orphanage or anything. I've often wondered how parents get through the night with the regular crying etc.

Last night I wondered that a lot, not being able to sleep from 4am after our youngest cat decided that the nighttime was the best time to go mental. He thundered up and down two flights of stairs, he divebombed our other cat, he attacked any moving protrubance under the duvet (toes mainly). And as a consequence, I got no sleep from 4am.

That's when I do my most astute thinking, and often my scariest. I remember the first time I stayed up until 3am at University and one of my friends said "Imagine if you were walking back to your room and looked out the window and just saw a nun with no face pointing at you from the distance". Yeah, thanks for that. And that's the sort of thing that comes back to me in the small hours.

I tend to think about the sheer amount of electrical equipment I have left on in the house. I turn off the tv at the switch but there are digital boxes, and broadband and the like that I daren't turn off for fear of them breaking. They hum in the silence and their lights shine brighter than ever, as if they are taunting me saying "look, we turn our lights up to use more power at night." The fridge rumbles and squeaks and even the toaster looks at me funnily.

I struggled to work out why I was so aware of all of this and then remembered that our electricity company told us last week that our direct debit was going up from £30a month to £85. That seems steep and more than likely means we'll run up a massive credit with British Gas and struggle to get it back. Maybe that's what spurred me into doting on technology.

Loads of other things ran through my head, about work and such. Thankfully I can't remember a huge amount about them as I eventually lapsed into unconsciousness around 6am (I don't class it as sleep). The only thing I did remember was to blog about it. So that's what you've got here, the best prepared (2 hrs solid thinking time) blog ever.