The following correspondence, clearly intended for the Editor of _The
Daily Ailment_, has found its way into our letter-box. Another example
of post-office inefficiency.
SIR,--As a regular reader of your valuable journal I am always deeply
interested in the views of your readers as expressed in its columns.
The recent letters on the cure of insomnia have interested me
particularly. Although I have read your paper for many years, always
eaten standard bread, study most diligently each morning my lesson
on Government wobble and waste, grow sweet peas, keep fowls, take my
holidays early (in Thanet) and read the feuilleton, in short perform
all the duties of an enthusiastic loyal Englishman, I cannot sleep.
Yesterday I decided to try the remedies suggested by your readers.
After inviting sleep with "a dish of boiled onions" I found that I
must go to bed "without having eaten anything for five hours or so."
This meant sitting up very late, but I found the time useful for
taking "deep long breaths." Meanwhile I ran through the names of
my friends alphabetically and emptied the feathers from my pillow,
replacing them with hops. Sometimes a hop got mixed up in a "deep long
breath," which was rather pleasant.
Every few minutes I left my friends' names to say to myself, "I am
terribly sleepy," or "I am falling asleep;" this was wrong, as the
boiled onions had not had nearly five hours. "Relaxing all my muscles"
was rather awkward, as one hand was filling the pillow with hops and
the other was "holding a wet sponge," which _would_ drip water on
the sheets. Another difficulty was "wafting myself in an imaginary
aeroplane" to bring about "a state of oblivion and coma," which I
might perhaps have done more easily by putting the hops to another
use.
I had to cut out the "recital of the Litany," partly because my
friends' names had only got as far as George (Lloyd), and also
because, being a Nonconformist, I don't know it. (I must learn it now
the feuilleton is finishing.)
But the most annoying part of the business was to find that, after all
this elaborate preparation for sleep, I was to "take a brisk walk for
half-an-hour" (whatever the weather conditions). Even this did not
work, for by that time the milkmen and newsboys were heralding the
dawn and kept my brain too alert.
As a final effort, do you think you could produce a nightcap model
of the Sandringham, or is it quite impossible for one who reads your
paper to be anything but wideawake?
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