I’m sitting here, in the darkness of night, lit only by the sepulchral glow of LED, trying to decide between being medusozoa or monkey.  You know what it’s like: all you want to do is to offer a little amusement, to make people smile, even occasionally to make them laugh: to offer a small diversion for the less than five minutes it takes to read what has taken – although it seldom shows – considerably longer to write.  From dog bowl to pavement takes many hours.  To put your foot in the by-product takes less than a second, but once you have liberally coated your shoe, you will walk around for days before you realise where the smell is coming from.  It will take even longer to chip it out of the sole and shagpile.  When you read, words seep in.  They form a lining to the brain that you may not even realise is there, until some of it starts to peel.

It is common – although possibly apocryphal – knowledge that we lose thousands of brain cells each day as we get older.  The understanding that the holes are growing ever-larger hangs over all of us.  Names, appointments and car keys fall into the cracks with alarming regularity.  Habits drop into fissures, swirl around with no means of escape, and become obsession.  Just try going to bed without checking the locks: you will not sleep, you will have to get up at some stage during the night to check them.  Eventually you will have to do so even if you have already checked them before turning in.  It becomes a battle of wills: You versus You.  You versus your own obsessive tendencies:
“Did you check the locks?”
“Yes I did.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Really really sure?”
You might as well get up and recheck straight away, because otherwise you are going to have to listen to yourself whittle for the rest of the night:
“Were they locked?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
I know people who take photographs before they go to bed, but it wouldn’t work for me:
“Yes, but are they today’s photo’s?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”

Sleep, itself, becomes a more slippery beast as you get older.  It becomes a matter of either remaining unconscious right through (despite the concern that ‘right through’ might just lead to eternity) or not sleeping at all.  And when you’re up in the night?  Well, you might as well read, hadn’t you?  You might as well have a cup of tea, you might as well have cake, and if it is your mission to amuse, you might as well turn anxiety into entertainment.  After all, whatever you write in the wee small hours cannot possibly make any less sense than what you write at any other time and it always pays to keep the brain active, right?  Just a quick glance at the internet will give you something to discuss won’t it?  Well no, because there is only so much you can say about skateboarding cats…

So what else is there to find?  Well, this being the way that the internet works, what I found was an article from October 1996 (Aging Brains Lose Less Than Thought by William J Cromie, The Harvard Gazette) headlined like today’s big news which asserts that ‘Oldsters’ – a term that is used throughout and is, as far as I am concerned, more than sufficient defence in a homicide trial –  actually lose far less in the way of brain mass as they get older than was previously believed, because the gouda-like specimens extruded from the elderly craniums for post-mortem rummaging in the past had all been those of dementia sufferers.  The point being that if some degree of dementia was not present, the diminution of mental processing capability would not have been so advanced.  Unless, of course, some degree of dementia is present in everyone over a certain age e.g. 16 years.  It also goes on to say that although we do not necessarily lose brain cells as part of the normal process of aging, those that we do have, do not work so well which – for reasons my own poor, enfeebled elderly brain cannot fathom – is much better.  Perhaps a skull full of jelly fish is far better than one half full of chimpanzees.

I’ll spend the night mulling it over…