Nazis didn't wear slippers

To bed quite early last night - for some reason I was knackered. I have been waking up at around 3 or 4 recently, then taking about an hour to get back to Dreamland, but last night the thing that woke me was the flashing blue light of an ambulance flickering on my ceiling from the street below at around 2.00.

So of course I had to get up and see what was going on, and was just in time to see the vehicle pull away, presumably containing the person who had left behind two unfeasibly large puddles of vomit in the road where it had been parked, one of which the drivers had decorated with a pair of disposable latex gloves. This person had actually hospitalised them self with drink, and I could hear his/her playmates cavorting around the corner, swearing at the tops of their voices and generally behaving as if the end of the world had just been announced.

It was Sunday bloody night, for God's sake. Actually no - it was (and still is) Monday bloody morning. You know me - I like a drink as much as the next man, but even in my most excessive bouts of celebration (a friend's wedding at a vineyard in southern France - don't remind me), I simply cannot see what is enjoyable about poisoning yourself by drinking a years-worth of units in a single night, and I cannot believe that a whole generation of Bath University Freshers are so depressed that they spend the first week of their courses attempting public suicide on the streets of the city in the most undignified way they can think of. Something else must be going on, and I don't know what it is - do I, Mr Jones?

So when I eventually went back to sleep, I had one of those dreams which are so mundane, that you wonder why you ever bothered to dream it in the first place, especially considering that the subject matter on offer covers every possibility in the known and unknown universe, including lucid sex with a willing teenager.

You know those bottles of alcohol rub which are placed in brackets at intervals of about fifteen feet on all the walls of hospitals these days, which we are encouraged to use to help prevent the NHS from killing us even quicker than they normally would? Well I had a dream about that.

I actually like using that stuff. I find it a pleasant experience, for some reason. I like the way it feels cold on your hands as you rub it in, and I like the way it disappears within seconds without a trace of greasiness.

Well, in my dream last night, I squirted a bit of it on my hands and when I rubbed it in, it left them feeling sticky and slimey, so that I had to find a wash-basin to get it off. That's it. That was my entire night's worth of dreaming.

Then, as I was drinking coffee and listening to the radio this morning, a woman writer who has been nominated for the Booker prize was discussing her entry - a book about what it was like to be a black jazz musician in Nazi Germany.

As she read out a line from it which described a regiment of soldiers marching past a building, and said that 'their sharp heels sounded like gun-shots as they hit the pavement', a sound-clip of marching Nazis was played in the background. That got me thinking about Nazi footwear in general, and I concluded that there had probably never been an instance of an SS officer who wore soft bedroom slippers between 1935 and 1945.

I began to mull over the implications of this, and wondered if it had any (as yet unproven or un-investigated) affect on the outcome of WW2, and conjectured that the decadence of Churchill's informal attire as compared to Hitler's, probably gave him a psychological advantage over the most overtly evil man the modern world has ever seen. This was at about 8.30 this morning.

No wonder I go to bed knackered every night.