Wet Legs At 5AM

One of my worst ideas. (And that's really saying something.)

Note: this piece is accompanied by a voiceover, read by the author. Click above to listen.

In the late 1990s, I decided my current method of pursuing a happy and successful life, which involved not putting much effort into anything except playing videogames and patiently waiting to win the National Lottery, wasn’t serving me terribly well - so I decided to go back to school.

What I really wanted was a place at university - but since I was in my late twenties at this point and my grades were profoundly limiting (top marks for English Language & Literature, a “C” for Geology and the rest a fruitless shambles), my best bet was retaking the exams I’d mostly fluffed in 1988, to make my way to the A-levels that would hopefully give me a shot at either York or Sheffield’s Archaeology undergraduate programme.

To do this: school. Not my former high school in my Yorkshire seaside home-town, which didn’t accept mature students - but a college in the nearby city of Hull.

This meant two things:

1. I, a vain and listless bespectacled young man of 27 years old, had to sit in classrooms with 16 and 17 year old, with both of us trying to pretend this felt even vaguely normal. The fact I acquired the nickname “Uncle Mike” should tell you something. But really, I think it was a lot weirder for them that it was for me - and I’m not saying there’s a firm connection here, but one of my fellow classmates later pretended he was King Arthur on American television, and that’s just one example that I know about. God knows how the rest of them are faring.

2. It meant I had to catch an incredibly early bus from the rural seaside town I live in. This meant getting up at 5 o’clock, which I was amazed to discover is a time not just in the afternoon, but also in the morning. I found this very confusing: why bother? Everyone is asleep. What’s the point in giving it a name?

In the end, I’d catch that bus at WTF-o’clock four times a week for nearly 3 years - and this is how I discovered my sleeping superpower, in an enormously unpleasant way.

One late November evening in 1998 before one of my college days, I forget to pull the only good pair of jeans I have out of the washing machine.

When I retrieve them just after Wow There’s Five In The Morning Too, I feel icy horror flood through me. They’re utterly sodden. The washing machine’s pipe has become clogged and it didn’t drain properly - and now all that trapped water has spent all night being re-absorbed by my jeans.

They’re so heavy I can barely lift them out the machine, and when I do so, each leg is a raging waterfall.

The only sane thing to do is wear other trousers. Obviously.

Only thing is, I don’t have any other trousers. Not really. I will be sitting in classrooms with Young Stylish People, and they WILL judge me harshly, and move me from the category of Cool & Weird into the unbearable hell of Extremely Uncool & Weird, if, say, I turned up wearing the moth-eaten corduroys I made a point of only going out at night in, or the flappy beige chinos I used for gardening chores because of the hideous discolouration in the crotch area (thanks for that, Weedol).

Alas, there is only one course of action available to me, and I’m not going to like it.

I desperately wring them out for a few minutes, my fingers going numb from the cold…

Then, with a series of sensations I hope never to have again, I drag the dripping and bitterly cold jeans on, peeling them up my legs and hoisting them far enough up that they reach my -

Alas. My memory has blanked this bit out. Probably for the best.

All I remember next is walking down the road in them, leaving twin trails of water on the path behind me.

A cold wind was blowing, it was 5.30am, and it was November. Any one of these could have broken me, but the combination felt like something beyond pure horror, something almost sublime in its awfulness.

I stood alone at the bus stop, in a widening pool of water.

When the bus finally arrived, I’d stopped dripping, a small mercy, but my legs had started to go numb.

Balanced atop my half-senseless anatomy, I gingerly squelched my way to the top deck of the bus, sat down with an audible splat - and almost immediately fell asleep.

This is my superpower, see. I can fall asleep on all forms of ground-based public transport. It’s not a terribly useful talent to have unless you do a lot of travelling, so maybe that’s why I became a travel writer for the best part of a decade. I’ve tested it everywhere I can think of, and it’s reliably a thing: trains, buses, trams, cable-cars, even a horse-drawn cart, I can conk out in a corner of all of them, and I’m always looking for other places to try. (I can’t sleep on planes - yet. One day, one day. I’m working on it)

But in this case, what I should have done was absolutely anything to keep my legs moving. Perhaps I could have generated a little heat to help with the process of drying my jeans out, or at least warming the gallon or so of water they were holding against my legs.

But - no. Superhero that I am, I bloody well fell asleep instead.

When I awoke around 45 minutes later, I discovered my legs and feet had gone. Oh, they were still there, I could see them, but when I poked at them? Nothing. I could sent motor-commands to them - like stand up, you wretched bastards, don’t let me down now - but it was like watching a film of my legs doing random things, with a weary ache from my knees emanating out of the middle of that vast, deadened fleshy nothingness.

But if I concentrated, I could move. And since I’d awoken when the bus stopped at the place I needed to get off, I had to move. I leapt to my feet, ready to depart - and my jeans shattered.

It wasn’t the material itself, of course. Marvellous stuff, denim, it’ll handle anything. All those gold-miners it kept alive. Terrific. But it doesn’t dry very quickly. If you go bad-weather hiking in standard jeans, you end up regretting it.

A lot of the washing-machine water soaking my jeans had now turned to ice. Great big sheets of ice, crusting my legs like invisible armour.

And when I stand up, it breaks. Great plates of ice splintering and falling off my legs, crashing onto the metal stairs as I pound my way down them in what I discover is a largely uncontrollable run - until I explode out the bus doors in much the same way Tom Cruise or Jean-Claude Van Damme wouldn’t, and sprawl face-first onto the tarmac, watched bemusedly by about 50 people, who also presumably noticed the faint outline of ice fragments I left behind me when I got up, shaped like my trousers.

The rest of the morning is a blur. I remember having my between-lessons coffee break outside, because it was windy, and I hoped that would help dry my jeans, which were now only dry in certain places, and the damp patches would be extremely difficult to explain.

But I remember this: the feeling in my legs started to return around an hour after lunch, when I was in a class - and it was so painful I had to pretend I was having a coughing fit, when in fact I was trying to not shriek in agony. You don’t forget something like that. I’ve tried. I’ve tried really hard. But, um - here we are.

I say all this not to appall you - although, that’s a fair reaction, I can’t fault your judgment there. But I’m aiming at the core question of this new series on getting a better night’s sleep: what are the conditions that make us able to sleep?

I was thinking this the other night in a tent on the beach here in Scotland. I was drifting off quite nicely, and then I noticed my back was getting unpleasantly cold, and that was because my inflatable mattress had punctured. I can tell you this: what I need for a good night’s sleep is not to be feeling the immensity of Scotland beaming its sub-zero temperatures right up my fundament. That does not make for a good night’s sleep.

But what about the psychological factors? What about our need to feel safe and secure, usually equating to having four walls around us or some equivalent? What are the privacy requirements for most of us, and why can I - an introvert - fall asleep in a public place where most folk would be on high alert?

Am I just…an idiot?

I mean it might be that, but for the sake of scientific curiosity, let’s assume it isn’t.

What are the most extreme places that people can fall asleep in - and is this a skill that anyone can learn?

That’s what we’ll be looking at next time.

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This is part of a new between-seasons series on what science says about getting a good night’s sleep, as I introduced here.

This one is free, but the rest of the series is for paid supporters.

Want to read it when it’s published? Please sign up below:

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Image: Marc Pell