Popsicle Toes

I'm not sure why but I had the unusual problem of not being able to fall asleep last night. I've documented my sleep problems on this blog before, but normally it's only a question of whether I can stay asleep, falling asleep has never been an issue. FYI, 2.30am on a winter's night, sleeping single in a double bed, is a cold and lonely place.

I had been tossing and turning for hours, so after a long internal battle about the merits of getting up (the perceived wisdom that it's better and more likely to bring on tiredness) Vs staying in bed (the perceived wisdom that it's warmer, just for starters), I grabbed a blanket and headed to the couch and my laptop.

By 4am I didn't feel significantly more tired, but I was starting to feel significantly more cold, so I headed back to bed. Now, I often have cold feet in winter. Real cold feet, not the jitters. But by the time I'd been back in bed for 5 minutes I knew I had a series case of popsicle toes. Throwing on a pair of socks didn't seem to help, so much so that I spent a few good minutes considering whether you could actually insulate the cold in with a pair of regular socks.

At 4am it seems a real possibility. I was prepared to consider almost anything.

Toe wiggling didn't seem to help. Frantically rubbing my feet together seemed to have a short term benefit, but then raised my heart rate so much that I felt more awake if anything. I considered getting up and either firing up the heater in the living room so that I could jam my toes up against it, or boiling water to make up a hot water bottle.

But then the rest of me gave my toes a reality check and told them to just man up and deal with it, because frankly the rest of me was not prepared to countenance another trip out of bed. The harsh tang of mutiny was in the wind. To make a short story long, somewhere around 5am or later an equilibrium between tiredness and toe warmth meant that I finally fell asleep. Until the alarm went off at 7.15...

Oh, come on.