I’m shattered.

My girlfriend has new neighbours in the flat downstairs. They seem pleasant enough – better than the last but one couple, anyway, who regularly throttled each other, screaming the place down before telling concerned neighbours that it was actually Jenny and I who were engaging in domestic violence. But there’s one way in which these new neighbours are not particularly pleasant: one of them – the man – snores. He snores, and snores, and snores. I’m trying to say that he’s a snorer.

It’s an incredible noise, with no known equivalent in the human or animal kingdom. On each intake of breath, pieces of his soft mouth tissue hammer relentlessly against equal and opposite pieces of soft mouth tissue, which greet each hammering with a huge round of mouth-tissue applause. God knows how the bloke’s girlfriend copes with it, but somehow these two people skip out of the block every morning looking thoroughly refreshed, while we stagger downstairs with dark, sunken eyes, grey complexions, before going back upstairs because we’re so tired we’ve both forgotten stuff. Jenny bought special snore-blocking ear plugs which have no effect whatsoever because the noise seems to be centred around the 50Hz frequency and resonates throughout the brickwork. It’s really pissing me off.

If the person next to you snores, you can give them a shove, and they generally stop for long enough to allow you to get back to sleep. But when they’re in an adjoining flat, there’s not a lot you can do; any knocking we might do on their ceiling is like feebly tapping with a pin compared to the monstrous roar coming out of this chap’s nose. Jenny has now decided to swap her living room and bedroom around, as the chances of getting a decent night’s sleep are as tiny as… as… that of an American teenager saying “I nearly died” after having described a scenario in which they did actually nearly die.

*

Last night I watched The Keith John Adams Trio before moving to a Chinatown restaurant to fork squid down my gullet. I was served by a Chinese girl who wore a name-badge saying “Sandra”. “Hello, Sandra,” I said. “I imagine Sandra isn’t your real name?” I was right. “No. My real name is Lei.” “Um… why did you choose the name Sandra?” “I didn’t. It was chosen for me by my first English teacher. I hate it.” Why? “All my friends were given much better names – Kelly, Emily – but Sandra is horrible. It’s so old fashioned. I hate it.” I pointed out to her that the random assigning of a name by some barely-qualified English teacher is, as far as I know, not a legally binding ceremony, and that she was free to change it. To whatever she liked. Whenever she liked. This seemed to make her happy, or as happy as you can be, cleaning up after some bloke who has messily attempted to fork squid down his gullet.