Saturday, January 28, 2006
The Walking In The Sleep
‘Twas the night after the wedding
And nothing stirred, not even a mouse. Unless that mouse happened to be a person, and that person was the Present Mrs B.
My wife, lovely and charming as she is, has never been able to gauge her own alcohol tolerance. And it seems to be a funny tolerance. She goes from a perfectly stable “I’m fine dear, really, I’m having a lovely time” to “pfffffffffffffft, har har har har har”-thud in an excruciatingly short space of time. She never sets out to get drunk, it just sort of happens somewhere in the space of half a Long Island Iced Tea and from there onwards it’s all a bit of a mess.
And she’s quite an annoying drunk. Not raucous or even badly behaved, just… well… annoying. She’ll tell you she’s a cute drunk. At least that what she just told me. What usually happens is that we jump in the car to go home and I, stoicly, refusing to have had any beerage at all, then have to put up with the following…
“Honey, did you have a nice time ?”
“Yes dear”.
“I’m so glad you had a nice time”.
She then lapses into a near comatose state for approximately ten seconds, forgets the previous 30 seconds entirely, and then repeats the conversation over and over until she finally mumbles something about gagging for a Big Mac and subsequently pebbledashes the side of the car.
Of course at every wedding there’s a drunk bridesmaid. Unfortunately at my sister-in-law’s wedding, the drunk bridesmaid was my wife. Just like every other occasion it all started out very innocently and to all intents and purposes appeared to stay that way. There was no falling over on the dance floor, no whoops-here-comes-dinner type incidents, and I even thought for a while that I’d got away with it. Apparently not.
The first clue I had was when the fresh air hit and she pointed her head towards the starry, starry night and started swaying, arms outstretched in the breeze. Then she started the “I really miss you guys” bit with her aunt and uncle who live halfway across the country from us. Very shortly afterwards she was completely in a world of her own, probably inhabited by pixies and a purple elephant called Bruce, and there was no rescuing her.
Now this in itself wasn’t really a remarkable experience. That started when we got back to the house. My brother-in-law’s a builder and he built his own house. At the time it wasn’t quite finished so the wardrobe in the room we were staying in didn’t have any doors on it and the shelves hadn’t been put up yet : they were just lying up against the wall.
So I’m in bed all toasty and I hear a knocking from inside the door-less wardrobe, followed by a stern “A little help here please”. I turn on the light to find my wife, starkers, inside the wardrobe wrestling with the shelves. As I’m half asleep, the strangeness of the situation doesn’t register and I free the bit of shelf she’s trying to maneuver away from the rest of them, tell her to get back into bed and turn the light off.
Next thing you know, clothes on and she’s off. A quick visit to the bathroom and 2 minutes later she’s got every light in the house on and I can see her through the cracked door standing motionless in the kitchen with a huge grin on her face, holding an imaginary baking tray. Enter the mother-in-law :
MIL : “What the hell are you doing ?”
PMB : “Can you believe that my sister doesn’t believe this baking tray’s real ?!”
MIL : “For God’s sake, just go back to bed.”
PMB : Grumble, huff, etc.
She stomps back into bed, plops her head down, and that’s it, she’s off in the land of nod again.
I’ve never actually seen anyone sleepwalk before. It’s quite an experience.
# posted by SideshowPete : 10:13 pm
