Elephants, elephants everywhere, but, well we haven’t seen any yet.

Take a night flight they said, get on, couple of wines, dinner and a film, then fall into a deep sweet sleep for 5 hours, wake up, cup of coffee and breakfast, maybe another film, and then arrive safe and sound skipping off the plane like Wayne Sleep. Uber to hotel, swim and lunch, quick doze before dinner on the beach, then back home for another doze prior to the 2:30am kick off of the quarter finals of the World Cup; England/ Norway, couple of pints and home giving us time for enough of a lie in to ease oneself into mega-relaxation and on the path to enlightenment ready for the road to Anuradhapura and the track into Willpattu nature reserve to see leopards, elephants and Sloth Bears. What could possibly go wrong…

The Wine-Dinner-Film combo went very well but as soon as I sat down in my chair I wondered if this chair would be conducive to actual sleep, or rather some sort of airless stress position torture as I shifted from micro position to micro position each time shutting my eyes and saying to myself “I can never sleep this way” I experienced pins and needles endlessly, wondered if I was having a stroke or minor beginner symptoms of a more serious as yet undiagnosed illness. 5 hours in and I have talked myself never going on long haul again and considering cruises a bit closer to home, christ I could probably drive to Sri Lanka in a week, make a thing of it, no one drives to Sri Lanka I thought.

I woke up after 6 hours and realised I’d dribbled on my shoulder, probably snored and felt worse than I expected according to the blind baseless faith I had in night flights. I think I managed possibly 2 hours in broken sleep, the longest section in the middle of a film I was enjoying which I probably can’t watch at home easily any more because I think the man who powers my dodgy fire stick has been arrested and therefore my Theft-o-vision won’t work. Breakfast was sound but sadly my Aural descent was worse than usual, my ears seem to have reverted to prepubescent levels and felt like my head was going to explode. I blame Ranjit Singh “Expert Good Ear Cleaner” who stuck a spatula in my ear whilst in India in the early 90’s, never recovered after that, and now its returned with a vengeance.

This lack of sleep is obviously having a knock on effect on the rest of the day planned, we arrive at lunch time, exhausted and will have to stay up for at least another half a day in order to be watching the flank end of the World Cup, which England are making their way through, somewhat unconvincingly but the results paint the picture if you’re looking at a wall chart, less so if you’re watching the games.

What our plan consisted of was to go to the beer shop and buy beer and wine, eat a curry and proceed to carry on late into the night drinking 8.8% Sri Lankan ale in the hope of, well nothing. We all knew this was going to be a game of survival, naked and afraid in a bar with no alcohol license which was showing the football at ridiculous ‘o Clock. A continuation party was sent out to man the tables and save the chairs whilst the older people went home to sleep and then wake up 2 hours later to get to the bar for kick off, which I think was delayed, then it went to Extra time, and we won, but I was so cross by the end of it all that at 5:30 when it was all done I marched home telling the following dogs to Fuck off where I had an angry sleep. Check out was in 4 hours…

More later. Love