Living life: Sleeping Foolishly

Sleeping is a sensitive topic. So you will be delighted to know that today, all we have to do is to talk sleep and foolishness. It’s not what you think, pervert? According to Napoleon Bonaparte, you might just be the perfect fool. Before you whack me, it’s Napoleon calling you a fool, not me! Apparently the fellow, who has been dead for two centuries, thinks that if you sleep for eight hours then you pass the bar to be called the fool. That means if you are dumb as I think, and the earliest you can get out of bed is six o’clock in the morning, then if you are anywhere near your sack before or even at exactly ten o’clock in the night, you are really a fool. How many of us fall culprit, one may ask? Your guess is as good as mine. You might say that the different sexes should have different standards, since after all their brain sizes are different, even though you say that in Rwanda, especially near the legislative houses or the justice ministry, at your own peril. The French revolutionary was actually a little bit kinder. A woman, in order to escape the ‘fool” tag should sleep one hour less than the fool. All the guys out there, says Bonaparte, who do the eleven o’clock to six o’clock night in bed, might just as well be called ‘women.’ But if you really think you are the man you want the rest of us to believe you are, and then you will just have to do with six hours of sleep. Enough of the tomfoolery, Napoleon may have won the right to call the rest of us fools because his short sleep sessions are supposedly part of the reason why he was a masterful soldier and grand tactician, but recent research suggests that the French man should have stuck to his most favourite subject – war, not sleep, since he was obviously poor at it. Stephen Emegbo, a University of Surrey Sleep Psychologist (who wants a career?) thinks that everyone’s sleep needs are unique like a thumbprint. He says that, “Older people need less deep sleep than younger people while women tend to have more slow-wave or restorative sleep than men.” Professor Jim Horne, the director of the Sleep Centre at Loughborough (pardon me?) University thinks that many people would like more sleep, but if you ask them what they would do with an extra hour a day, most wouldn’t use it to sleep. However the two things which we can not do without in life are death and taxes. There is plenty of evidence to support Prof Horne, right at my neighbourhood shop where at seven a.m on any Monday morning, you will find people patriotically and calmly paying their taxes – emptying big brown scary Primus bottles and killing their livers in the process - on Monday morning. See, Napoleon was right about a few things, they are plenty of us around, the fools. When do they ever sleep if they begin to drink in the morning and stop in the wee hours of the morning? Again your guess is as good as mine. Have a sleepy, non-alcoholic Sunday. Contact: kelviod@yahoo.com