Snoring....

Yes, snoring.

A touchy subject you would think. Yes indeed - no-one likes to admit to snoring, do they?
It's the butt of some seriously bad jokes, used to add comic effect to many a sitcom, but really it's just not that funny!
Not when you are the snorer...

Now I have recently discovered that I snore really badly. Recently? Yes.
As I have spent most of my life sleeping alone, how would I know that I snore?
Until I started travelling again and found myself sharing many rooms with complete strangers (female strangers, I have to add!), along with some friends.

Now I know how bloody badly I snore.
For example, in Sydney, I was woken in the middle of the night by a girl I'd never seen before shaking me and jabbering something incomprehensible into my face. Nearly scared me to death, until I realised that she was insisting that I stop snoring and let her get some sleep,

And then in New Zealand, in a room of four, a very grumpy German girl spent half the night stamping about as I was keeping her awake. In the end, one of my friends gave her some ear plugs and she fell asleep, while I spent the rest of the night trying to stay awake so as not to disturb anyone - listening to the rest of them snoring!
But not as loudly as I do :(

At a Buddhist retreat, I was in a dormitory, where all the women were too kind to say anything. However, they nearly all changed rooms in the course of my stay...

I have been told that it's not like a normal snore, but it sounds like I stop breathing, then snort myself back to life again. Reading up on this, it sounds a bit like a condition known as sleep apnoea.

So I thought I'd go and see if my doctor could help do anything about it.
You know what she said?

She didn't see it as a problem, as I sleep on my own & don't have a partner. She reckoned that the people I share a room with on the odd occasion could put up with it.

OK - so she's now condemned to sleeping alone for ever more, hasn't she? I may not have a partner now, but maybe I'd like to have one before I die :)

Who's going to want to sleep beside a person who makes a sound like a lear jet every night?

My current solution nowadays is to carry a packet of earplugs whenever I'm travelling. I hand them out to any room-mates - it's less embarrassing to admit in advance that I am going to sound like the monster of the deep, than to be woken by a grumpy tourist a 3am.

But it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the dating stakes. How sexy must I be, snoring like a train all night?

Ah well, Archie doesn't seem to mind....
(Archie is my little dog)  cheers Archie xxx