Strange nights spent away from where you normally sleep (usually no beds involved)

[Toby Gymshorts]

I'm not sure what to say Balders, thanks for sharing this and I really hope it was helpful for you.

You've really got a talent for narrative writing which needs to be read by a larger audience. Look after yourself and your family.

Seconded. Phenomenal, powerful writing.

[Balderdasha]

2016: Tales from the mother and baby unit

It was very confusing at first. I was still semi-psychotic and didn't really understand what had happened. I had to learn how to bottle feed a baby (when they first brought my son to me I kept trying to breastfeed him on reflex and couldn't understand why they wouldn't let me. Because of the drugs I was on, I was never able to breastfeed him again. For me, that was one of the biggest losses of the whole situation, that my choice on how to feed my baby was ripped away from me).

Nothing made any sense. I wasn't wearing my own clothes (my mum and sister had donated some). My sister had braided my hair in a style that she usually did her daughters' hair in, but I never did mine like that. I was in a single bed in a university dorm style room. The bed had rubber sheets and was very uncomfortable. Everything in my room had been labelled with my first name with Sharpies, which also seemed weird. The nurses had objected that I didn't have many toiletries in my room so my sister brought loads of travel-size creams and make up things, which was weird because in my normal life the only 'toiletries' I use are: toothpaste, soap, shampoo, conditioner, one all-purpose moisturiser. I would marvel at these tiny tubes and bottles all labelled with my name. Why were they mine? How did they get there? What were they for?

I was given lots of literature to read about post-partum psychosis but I couldn't really take it in. I had scheduled meetings with psychologists and psychiatrists who tried to explain what had happened / was still happening.

There were about six other mums and babies in the unit who had various mental health conditions. We each had our own room with space for our babies to sleep with us in a cot, but to start with my son was sleeping in the nearby nursery so his cries didn't disturb my sleep. I also worried that I was going to harm my son and didn't want to be left alone with him.

There were lots of nurses, who rotated on 8-12 hour shifts, so the constant changing cast was quite confusing.

For a while I found sitting on a chair very triggering, because it reminded me of being zoned out in the armchair in the back garden the day before I was sectioned, and also once sitting in a chair in the corridor of one of the mental hospitals and stroking the striped, textured side of the chair and having a weird hallucination about the chair being alive. So I would pace the corridors or lie on my bed, but I didn't like sitting down.

I hid behind chairs in an office having a babbling, psychotic episode and a very kind and friendly nurse, who had the name of an angel, gradually calmed me down. I recently phoned the ward to talk to them about something, and I could hear him shouting in the background asking how my son is.

I slept a lot. I kept thinking that if I went to sleep, maybe I just wouldn't wake up and the whole nightmare would be over. But I kept waking up.

I woke at strange times. I would roam the ward at night, bumping into other residents in the kitchen or the lounge, frequently asking them how many grandmothers they had alive when they were born. Sometimes the nurses had to chase me back to my room and sedate me.

One day I locked myself in the toilet and tried to stay there long enough to die, but the nurses broke the door down after ten minutes.

Sometimes I cuddled my son and bottle fed him, but I felt quite distanced from him.

I lay in bed, planning how to die.

My husband came to visit me every day after work and helped me feed our son, bathe him, dress him in his pyjamas and try to rock him to sleep. Often I would go to sleep exhausted at 7 or 8pm, and my husband would stay looking after our son for another three hours, before starting the long journey home (we have no car, he was doing a two-three hour round trip via buses, trains and taxis). He did several very thoughtful things during this time. I never knew what day or time it was and I was constantly asking questions about time. So my husband bought me a very simple, waterproof, Casio digital watch in my favourite colour. I still wear it to this day. It was very quiet in my room, so he bought me a radio, tuned it to a music station and all I had to do was press one button to operate it. He brought photos of the kids and put them in frames on my window shelf. He brought our daughter to visit me at the weekends and brought favourite story books for me to read to her (even when at my most out of it, I could cuddle my daughter and read her a story).

My mum, my sister and my dad also came to visit me and would stay for hours, helping to entertain my son. My husband arranged for a couple of my friends to visit.

About six days into my stay, I noticed two spots on the back of my son's neck that I thought was chicken pox. One of the nurses came to check him and said it was probably nothing to worry about. I went ape shit, screaming at her that she wasn't a proper medical professional and that I demanded a proper doctor came and looked at my son now. They eventually brought a doctor in just to calm me down. My son did have chicken pox.

This meant that me and my son were put in isolation to protect the other babies. Where previously I had been able to walk around the ward, including two lounges, a kitchen, a dining room, a bottle preparation room, a nursery, and a garden, now I had to just stay in my room with my son. The nurses stepped up their help, but it was still brutal. My son also had eczema so wanted to scratch continuously. All the photos of him from this time have his hands covered in socks to stop the scratching. The days were taken up in an endless cycle of washing my son, covering him in calamine lotion, dressing him, covering his hands in socks, feeding him, changing his nappy, etc.

Despite our best efforts, my son got chicken pox under his nails and bit his fingers to try and stop the itching. His fingernails went black. My husband had to take my son to A&E. My mum drove him there, but then just left him on his own with one bottle of milk and a cranky baby for a four hour wait. At one point, my husband overheard the doctors discussing whether it was gangrene and that maybe our son's fingers would need to be amputated. Thankfully, it didn't come to that. My husband and son were released with a course of antibiotics and came back to the ward. It was 5am and my husband had to go to work. He asked the angel nurse if he could use the shower, but due to an incident involving a previous partner, he couldn't allow him to. So my husband washed his face and his armpits as best he could, then went and delivered a training course on zero sleep (we're self-employed, there is no sick leave).

Gradually though, despite the horror, I was starting to get more of a grip on reality.

[Balderdasha]

A mini-story from 2014 for a bit of light relief. We booked last minute and got a good deal to stay two nights in Brighton at the start of the new year. We arrived quite late, it was dark, wet and windy, but we know Brighton quite well so we decided to walk to the hotel to save money. Also, our daughter was asleep in the pushchair and at this point we were terrified of the consequences of ever waking her (she had a mighty set of lungs on her).

As we got closer to the seafront, the wind and rain picked up. We tried to fit the rain cover over the pushchair, but it just acted as a sail and made it a real struggle to keep the pushchair on the ground. I began to wonder what on earth we were doing out in a storm, in the dark, with a baby. We had to go right to the seafront for the entrance to the hotel and when we got there, it was shut. We'd had a bit of trouble confirming our booking and for a moment I thought that the whole hotel had gone into administration and we were stranded.

Fortunately, all that had happened was they closed the seafront entrance due to the storms and we made it safely in the side door.

The next day, the weather was a little calmer. We made cheese sandwiches from the breakfast buffet, walked onto Brighton pier and sat in deckchairs watching the raging seas. My daughter was temporarily asleep in her pushchair and I distinctly remember that being one of the most relaxing moments I'd had in months.

For context on the storm, see this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-25583125

[Antepli Ejderha]

I'm not sure what to say Balders, thanks for sharing this and I really hope it was helpful for you.

You've really got a talent for narrative writing which needs to be read by a larger audience. Look after yourself and your family.

[Balderdasha]

I don't know the order of the next memories but I remember:


Waking up in one room with white walls and a high up window where I could just about see people walking past in the corridor outside. I thought they were aliens and I had been abducted.


Being in a room with walls the same colour green that all the bedding is in youth hostels. There were lots of shelves and nooks and crannies that I thought were representations of different letters and I kept trying to read the wall.


Going into an en suite shower and finding another drain like the drain in the garden and trying to see if I could crawl out of it.


Going outside my room to a corridor, sitting on a stool and having an in depth conversation with someone who must have been another mental patient.


Believing at one point that one of my best friends from university was in the room next door giving birth, and I was simultaneously giving birth and we were telepathically giving each other strength while screaming through our contractions.


A ham sandwich being placed next to my bed (I'm vegetarian. My family say this did happen and they objected strongly to the staff about it) and wondering whether I was secretly a cannibal and that was why I was incarcerated.


My husband appearing one evening with a big rucksack filled with supplies (he did bring real things for me, photos, colouring books, snacks, drinks, etc) and believing that he was packing for a big expedition, perhaps for us to stage a daring escape together and head off to survive in the wilderness.


Having conversations in my head with everyone I knew who was part of a couple and asking them to all name three important things they had in common (a bit like the scene in Malcolm in the Middle where they're struggling and out in the rain and Lois demands that they find five reasons right there and then to keep going). At one point I saw a shadow over the bed, and knew that it was death, specifically death as depicted by Terry Pratchett and I realised that one of the things that me and my husband had in common was enjoyment of Terry Pratchett and I laughed and cackled myself silly at the fact that I'd forgotten that. My mum must have heard me say Terry Pratchett because the next day she brought me a book of Terry Pratchett quotes.


At one point I realised I was the only person in the world who had made the connection between Heston Blumenthal and chocolate, and I was going to be a millionaire because of it.


This took us to about day six. As I still hadn't eaten or drunk anything, I was severely dehydrated and I was transferred to a general ward so I could be put on an IV drip. Things I remember from this period are:


There was a ceiling fan spinning slowly like in the famous scene from Apocalypse Now, and maybe I was a Vietnamese war veteran, hallucinating the whole second half of the twentieth century.


Another time I realised I was actually in the midst of the ebola epidemic, that was why everyone was in scrubs and there were curtains round my bed and again, I had hallucinated my whole life in the West.


A friendly smiley nurse sat by my bed and I thought she was a clown.


One time I woke up and my mum was by my bed crying and she said "I'll be an izzy whizzy busy Lizzie if you want" and I went back to sleep.


One time there was a tray in front of me with egg and chips on a plate and I seemed to actually be eating, but at the same time the chips were like the hands of a clock and they kept going round and round faster and faster.


Once I went and sat next to an elderly lady who was hooked up to an oxygen tank and had a really nice chat to her for an hour. I confided in her that I thought I might be mad and she said I shouldn't worry about it, that she'd had the nicest conversation she'd had for days with me. That made me feel a little better.


I was still stuck on binaries and trying to get back to the middle. I'd tried escaping lots of ways, back / forwards, in / out, left / right. I was staring at some angel shaped light fixtures on the ceiling and I realised I hadn't tried up / down. Maybe I could escape this nightmare if I went high enough up. So I tried physically climbing the bed frame. I still had my IV drip attached and I nearly ripped it out before nurses came and sedated me again.


One morning, around day seven, I woke up suddenly a bit clearer in the head, found my phone and called my husband at 5am. "What's going on?" I demanded. "Why am I in hospital?" My husband was deliriously happy at the sound of my voice. I even used his name. It was the first ray of light he had that I might one day come back.


Day nine, I was moved to a mother and baby unit, and they brought my baby son to come and stay with me. It was the first concrete proof I had that I hadn't killed him. It was the start of a long, slow, painful recovery.

[Balderdasha]

I was led out to the ambulance and strapped down in the bed in the back. My husband rode in the front of the ambulance though I didn't realise this. My mum and sister took my daughter and son home to calm them and feed them. I have no idea how my sister managed to transition a baby, that she didn't know all that well, from breastfeeding to bottle feeding cold turkey. No matter what has happened between us since, I will always remain grateful for that.


My experience of the ambulance journey was bizarre. I believed that my husband had hired a cast of amateur thespians to play the roles of police and ambulance technicians and that the ambulance was simply parked outside my house with other bit-players outside rocking the vehicle to simulate movement. I had no theory as to why he would have done this. I was convinced that when this charade stopped I would be led back to my house. I babbled incoherently. I sang loudly. I thrashed against the bonds. I screamed sometimes.


Eventually, we arrived at the hospital and were triaged into a waiting room. At this point, my husband didn't know whether what was happening to me was mental or physical, permanent or reversible. I had stopped making much sense verbally, so he sat by my bedside trying to google as much information as he could about my state. I remember at one point lying on a single bed staring at him, willing him to look up from the phone but he didn't.


Other, increasingly incoherent memories from this room. I watched my husband gradually age all the way to a decrepit old man, then, when he got up to go to the en suite toilet, I believed he was shielding me from his transformation into a skeleton slumped on the bathroom floor. He was then reborn in the toilet and came back to me as the age I remembered him. It genuinely felt like I had watched that whole passage of time.


I had been watching lots of Unbreakable Kimmi Schmidt prior to my episode. There was a duality in my mind between the optimistic world of Kimmi and the bleakness of Game of Thrones. I kept remembering the hand crank and that if I could survive the next ten seconds, I would make it through.


At one point, I decided that if I launched myself flat onto the bed, smacking my head and then immediately leapt up shouting hallelujah, I could reset reality to the point where I was sane. So I did this repeatedly, trying to get the sequence fast enough, so it would be just right. I think this took us through to Day Three with zero sleep.


Day four, I was transferred to a mental health ward. This room had a door out to a garden. I was having an obsession with binaries and trying to find the middle somehow. I kept singing really high and then really low, or really loud and then really quiet. This had something something to do with my aunt who is actually an opera singer. I thought that the garden was the garden of Eden, or the entrance to death and heaven. I kept dancing on the threshold between the room and the garden, trying to outwit death. The garden had three types of bin or drain, maybe one was a recycling bin, one was a waste bin and one was a drain in reality. In my head, they were different choices after death, cremation, burial, etc, and I was trying to avoid them all because I didn't want to die yet.


A couple of weeks before my episode, I had taken my son with me to an evening baby and toddler first aid course. Something was obviously not right then. The instructor had demonstrated CPR on a dummy, and then asked the delegates to practice in turns on a couple of other dummies. As there were not many dummies available, I had taken my son out of his buggy to see whether I could practice on a live baby. I only stopped when I saw the scared looks on the other parents' faces. While I was in the garden at the mental hospital, I remembered answering a question that the midwife instructor had posed, and became convinced that I had actually carried on practicing CPR on my infant son and had accidentally killed him. Everything I remembered since that point had been the fevered imaginings of my grief-stricken mind and I was now in an asylum for insane mothers who had killed their babies. I had an imagined conversation with the midwife instructor and it suddenly became very important to know how many grandmothers everyone had had alive at the time of their birth. I was waiting for both of my grandmothers to appear in the Eden/death garden and I was particularly fearing being reacquainted with my mother's mother who was extremely formidable, and having to confess to killing my son.


By this point, I was not speaking in any intelligible language, even though I was singing / speaking continuously and very fast. The doctors had a theory that maybe I had reverted to a childhood first language, either real or invented, so they called my sister in to see if she could translate. My sister says that I was speaking in a combination of words from kids' TV programmes like the Teletubbies and In the Night Garden and Waybuloo and words from real languages that I know (I studied Latin at school, I have French and German GCSEs, I learnt enough Spanish to travel independently round South and Central America, I achieved partial fluency in Mandarin Chinese in my twenties, my husband speaks Arabic, his parents are also fluent in Italian. Through my travels I've learnt snippets of Polish, Vietnamese, Russian, etc. I know a lot of weird words), but she wasn't able to translate. I remember having an intention to absorb / understand / speak all the languages in the world in order to save everyone. My sister says I said my ex-boyfriend's name at this point. If I did I suspect it was because I wanted to include Cantonese (which he spoke but I don't). My sister decided that this was evidence that I was secretly in love with my ex, not my husband.


My sister is trained as a nursery nurse, so she tried to use the techniques she uses with toddlers with me. She tried giving me binary options, e.g. do you want to drink water or tea (by this point I had not eaten or drunk anything, or slept, or stopped dancing, singing or talking for over four days), but as I was already having a binary obsession this reinforced my weird world view and backfired. I threw tea all over her at one point. She also tried repeating the words I was saying back to me to build rapport. However, in my mind at this point, my sister and I were in a room filled with infinite, invisible babies, all the babies that had ever and would ever live, and we had joint responsibility for deciding which ones should die. I would suggest the name of a baby to die, saying something like 'Hamlamliboo?' and she would repeat 'yes, Hamlamliboo' back to me and I would get distraught because how could she agree with me that Hamlamliboo should die, when Hamlamliboo was such a lovely baby and had never done anything to hurt anyone!


The tights and shoes my sister was wearing on this day also confused me because they were the same ones she wore on the day I was taken from my house and I kept getting my timelines muddled. I had no idea how much time had passed, whether we were going forward or backwards in time, if it was day or night or anything.


I was taken to my first ward round / meeting with a psychiatrist this day. I didn't know that was what it was. All I knew was that we went to a different room where there was a woman on a computer. I was pleased by this because I'd also been having a binary imaginary fight between the childhood influences of my mother (positive / light / good) and my father (negative / dark / bad), and between the forces of male and female, and my mother was the one who first bought us a computer at home and taught us how to use it. I thought the meeting was proof that the feminine forces of good were succeeding.


Somewhere around day four/five, the doctors must have managed to inject me with enough sedative to finally knock me out.

[Balderdasha]

2016: a first-person account of the descent into psychosis.


Warning: shit tonnes of triggering stuff for anyone who's had mental health difficulties, or known anyone who has.


The week before: I was already getting very little sleep. Our four month old son needed breastfeeding and comforting throughout the night. I alternated between rocking him over my shoulder, breastfeeding him, or co-sleeping as best I could, I'd created a 'safe space' between me and the cot, with no duvets or pillows that could suffocate him. My husband was commuting full-time to London, so I was trying to take the bulk of the night shift off him. I'd started to believe I could survive with very little sleep.


Then, I found inappropriate messages on my husband's phone from him to his ex. We had a massive row, and lots of heart to heart talking that ate into our already minuscule sleep quota. We asked my mum to babysit one night while we went to a relate session where I laid into my husband with great gusto. During the day, looking after the kids, I took my anger out by buying loads of coloured chalks and staging my own version of the festival of holi in the back garden. Me and my daughter took turns to jump up and down on the chalks, crushing them into the patio.


My husband went to a friend's wedding while I stayed at home looking after the kids. I became paranoid that he would have a car crash and I'd lose him which would be even worse than what we were already going through, so I stayed up all night waiting for him. Day one of zero sleep.


The next day was hot and we set up a barbecue in the back garden. My mum came to stay. I was phasing out, sitting in an abandoned arm chair in the back garden, not speaking, not engaging with anything. My daughter had an accident (she was potty training) and was running around the garden bare-bottomed. All the halloumi kebabs burnt because I wasn't watching them. I began to obsess that I had broken my relationship with my daughter by getting angry when she had accidents and then thought I had discovered the way to 'heal our daughter'. I had a very weird conversation with her, then realised I wasn't talking clearly and switched to worrying that my husband had let me carry out 'an experiment' on our daughter that had harmed her. My mum was concerned by my behaviour but everyone thought I was just overtired.


The kids went to bed. For some reason, we decided it would be a good idea for me, my husband and my mum to play 'cards against humanity'. For future reference, if there is any chance you're heading into a manic or psychotic episode, don't play this game, it's just too weird. My mum and husband then insisted I went to bed. I put on my pyjamas and lay in bed, but there was no chance of sleeping. I became convinced that I had found the type of truth that backpackers go looking for when they want to 'find themselves'. This progressed to thinking I had achieved Buddhist enlightenment. I became very excited and wanted to share my discoveries, it would be selfish to keep this joy and insight to myself.


I went downstairs in my red spotted pyjamas and gave my mum and my husband a long, incoherent, preachy speech, the type of thing you see evangelists spouting outside Brixton tube. I felt that I had finally revealed my true self to my mother. She looked horrified. I had recently watched the episode of Game of Thrones where the red lady takes off her golden choker and transforms into an ancient crone. That's roughly the transformation that my mum's face went through in my part-hallucination.


My husband chivvied me back to bed and tried to encourage me to sleep. He and my mum discussed whether I needed medical help. They decided to see whether a good night's sleep would help first. I didn't sleep that night either though. I thought I heard my mum sobbing in the night, but didn't go to check on her and felt terribly guilty about that. I kept my husband awake all night with spurious theories. I thought I was receiving direct revelations about my personal history. I understood, at last, that my mother had had a psychotic episode when I was a baby, and had told everyone that I was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. I believed that she had been sectioned, and that maybe that was why my dad and sister walked on eggshells trying not to trigger extreme emotions in her. It was a family conspiracy that they had hidden from me as the youngest child. Day two with zero sleep.


By the third morning I believed that I had been sent on a mission to rid the world of paedophilia and that I needed to summon every single human in the world to my house, possibly to have sex with them in order to cleanse the world. I rang my sister to summon her first. She came with her second eldest daughter, who was fourteen at the time. I was horrified that she had brought my niece because it threw out my calculations of trying to have more adults in the house to balance out and protect the children. By this point I was clearly not safe to look after the children so my niece took the kids out in the garden, playing football with my daughter and rocking the baby in the buggy.


I kept panicking where the children were. I was repeatedly taken to an upstairs window to look out and see the children were safe in the garden. This triggered ideas about the garden of Eden. I had also been reading about 'Johari windows', a psychological theory which looks at how much you understand yourself and others, through the windows you can and can't see. I thought the physical window was a Johari window and was revealing new information about my family that had previously been hidden from me.


My sister had previously had severe postnatal depression after her third child, which nearly tipped into psychosis. She decided it was imperative to get me to sleep through any means necessary and tried to get me to take antihistamines. Unfortunately, as a child, I had a severe phobia of swallowing tablets, and this triggered an unpleasant memory of being on an exchange trip to Germany, having terrible earache and being prescribed weird homeopathic green tablets that my mum spent hours trying to force me to swallow.


At some point, my family had called for medical assistance and a GP came to the house. I was pleased that more people were arriving at the house as this fit with my plan. I had a conversation with the GP, but I don't remember much of it. The GP said that I was having an episode, but didn't think I needed immediate sectioning, agreed that they should encourage me to sleep, and said to phone for further assistance if I became violent, then left.


My son needed feeding and I was in no state to do this. My sister went to the shop to buy formula milk and bottles. I was confused about why the number of people in the house kept going up and down, when I thought it only needed to go up. When my sister came back with the formula milk, I was lying on the bed. She lay down next to me with a bottle of formula milk to ask my permission to feed it to my son.


Opinions differ on what happened next. What I remember is that I thought she intended to bottle feed me like a baby and that was all wrong, because I was supposed to be the most adult person in the house, saving all the children. My sister says that I attempted to throttle her and threw her to the floor. My husband downstairs heard a thud, rushed upstairs and by the time he got there, me and my sister were standing on opposite sides of the room, staring each other down. My sister had phoned 999 and reported that she had been violently attacked.


Here, personal experiences colour actions and expectations. My sister is a white British woman who implicitly trusts the police. My husband is a male, immigrant, brown-skinned Palestinian, with personal and family experience of police brutality. My sister's intention with phoning the police was to accelerate my access to medical care. My husband feared that they would cause me physical harm. Because the call had been logged as domestic violence, without the gender of the perpetrator being specified, the police sent their hardcore squad. Two very large, beefy officers, one male, one female, arrived, wearing stab vests, prepared to fight. At this point, I had got very fighty, I'd been screaming at my husband and threatening to push him down the stairs and break his neck. At some point I briefly accused my husband of raping me. When the police arrived, my husband was holding me in a jiu-jitsu disabling hold, attempting to stop me causing damage either to myself or to anyone else.


The police didn't know who was the violent person in the room. I was alternating between struggling to break free and then going completely floppy in a bizarre attempt to demonstrate to the police that I trusted my husband. My husband was just pleading 'please don't hurt her, please don't hurt my wife'. It was a very charged atmosphere, but again, it fit with my aim to have everyone in the world come to my house. Gradually, the situation was explained, and everyone lowered their guard a little. An ambulance arrived and my husband dressed me to go to hospital (previously I was still dishevelled and in pyjamas, sometimes with my large boobs flying free of clothing). This was easier said than done as in my mania phase a week or two earlier, I had gone all Marie Kondo and donated virtually all my clothes to charity shops. The few that remained were in the dirty laundry pile.

[Balderdasha]

Ok, I just tried to post the 2016 story and I have exceeded the maximum character limit by more than double! Will have to break it up. This is the first time I've sat down and written the whole story. Whether anyone reads it or not, it's already been cathartic for me.

[Balderdasha]

I'm avoiding the big story of 2016, so for now, here is the saga of the Polish entomologist.

2006: I needed to fly home from Beijing, but wanted to meet a friend for a holiday on the way back. I discovered that a new route had just opened up where the plane would stop in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and you could stay there for a couple of weeks for no extra cost to your flight home. I arranged with my friend to meet her in Colombo. As I was getting on the plane in Beijing, I realised that I hadn't sent any more detailed instructions, so I borrowed a stranger's laptop, rifled through my guide book, picked a hostel at random and sent a hurried email to my friend suggesting we meet at that hostel.

Miraculously, we managed to meet. The hostel was run by a very friendly old lady who was possibly suffering from dementia. She let us wash all our clothes and then hang them out in the lounge to dry, before we started travelling.

We went a fairly standard route, visiting tea plantations, Kandy and Sigiriya. Every place we went, we kept bumping into the same Spanish woman and Polish guy, so we ended up drinking arak with them in the evenings. One night, we drank rather too much and the Spanish woman decided to retire to her hostel. It was late and dark, and she was tottering around, so I offered to see her safely back to her hostel. The Polish guy declared that he'd walk us both there safely. I think the Spanish woman had been secretly hoping that just the Polish guy would walk her back and I somewhat cramped her style. Anyway, we left her at her hostel and wandered back. Somewhere along the way we started kissing and fell in a ditch (the Polish guy made sure he was the one who hit the ground first and really scraped up his arm). I made it back to my hostel, but not back to my own room.

The next morning, my friend was furious because she'd been worrying where I was all night. 'What if you'd fallen in a ditch?' she yelled. To be fair, I had. I was too hungover to be reasonable about it though. We were supposed to be leaving the town that day and going to an elephant sanctuary, but we delayed by a day because I was too ill to travel. The next day I swapped emails with the Polish guy and waved goodbye.

At the next town we did some more touristy stuff and fended off the advances of a lecherous chef who liked to sit in the hostel restaurant and masturbate. Then, the next day, the Polish guy appeared at our room window. He'd cancelled the plans he had to return to India, and decided to follow me. We'd only told him which town we were going to, so he'd gone around all the hostels with our description until he found us. I was a bit surprised, but pleased to see him, and the three of us travelled together for another few days.

Now, back in Colombo, I had applied for a job that was emailed round to all the language assistants who were leaving China. I had worked out that the email address we were given was incorrect, and found the correct one to send my application to. Probably that thinned out the field, but either way, I was offered a phone interview. I found myself in a tiny telephone booth, in rural Sri Lanka, on a Friday evening, wildly exaggerating my skills and promising that I could start a job in London on Tuesday morning, no problem. I got the job.

I trudged back to the hostel and told my friend and my now sort-of Polish boyfriend that I'd have to go back to Colombo to try and get a flight in time. They took it as well as could be expected and Saturday morning we went our separate ways. I got myself a Sri Lankan phone card, got on a train and spent eight rickety hours on the train on the phone to the airline company trying to rearrange my flight. My friend and the Polish guy travelled together to the beaches I'd been planning on visiting.

Back in Colombo, I had just enough time to go to the airline office to get my new ticket, pick up all my laundry and bags from the friendly dementia lady, and flew home. I arrived in the UK seven hours before my new job started.

As I'd started the job so hurriedly, I hadn't had time to arrange accommodation, so for the first few weeks I stayed at my parents' house in Suffolk and my dad drove me to the edge of the tube network early each morning. Then, a friend put me in touch with a family who were renting a room in New Cross Gate. It was only £300 a month and the low-cost and lack of fixed contract outweighed any downsides. They were a friendly family, black dad, white mum, two teenage daughters. I had use of the family kitchen for cooking and eating and used to help the girls with their Spanish homework on the kitchen table. The lounge was off limits though, family only, so I would retreat to my lonely little single-bed room and watch crap on my laptop (I think I was watching a lot of Dexter and Heroes around this time).

I'd also read a lot of emails. My friend and the Polish guy emailed about their continued travels on the beaches of Sri Lanka. My friend said the Polish guy drank lots of vodka and wrote terrible poetry about missing me. The Polish guy then continued with his planned travels to Asia. He had a varied career. Degrees in law and social anthropology. A keen interest in nature and travel photography. But his main source of income was entomology. Finding, capturing, buying and trading insects.

My friend came back to London and moved in with her Colombian boyfriend / husband-just-for-the-visa. The Polish guy finished his travels and planned to visit me in London. I described him to the family I was lodging with as my long-term boyfriend who had just been away travelling, so they wouldn't find it strange when he came to stay. I don't remember a huge amount about his visit, except that we visited the science museum, and went to a party at my friend's flat where we drank too much arak and Polish vodka, I drunkenly blocked my friend's toilet with loo roll, I headbutted some tiles off the bathroom wall, and we ended up very hungover on a bus in South London on a very hot morning, not enjoyable.

Polish guy went back to Poland, I carried on with my job, and arranged to have ten days off to go and visit him in Poland later in the year. We went to Krakow and Katowice, then went to visit his Catholic, non-English-speaking family in his small home-town. They were kind, but were obviously baffled by the appearance of a foreign vegetarian, and quite suspicious about my intentions with their son. The Polish guy showed me his terrifying entomology room with cases and cases filled with beetles, butterflies and cockroaches. Two days into my stay with the family, the Polish guy decided to split up with me.

I was more shocked than anything else. For our whole 'relationship', I had been saying, let's play it by ear, we live in different places, there's no real point treating it as anything but fun, while he had been professing undying love, and making plans for how we could end up in the same country together long-term. Perhaps the juxtaposition of me with his family had jolted him out of the fantasy.

Whatever provoked it, I still had six days to spend in Poland. We went to his family cabin in the mountains, hiked, ate smoked cheese and played Scrabble awkwardly.

I came home confused and threw myself into my job, where the next thing I had to do was take eleven teenagers on a prize-winning tour of Beijing.

[Balderdasha]

Spring 2016: we had a potty-training two and a half year old daughter, and a four month old son, and were completely deliriously sleep-deprived, but we still decided to go away for our third wedding anniversary. Ambitions had been dampened down somewhat, so we went to a hotel in the same county that had a swimming pool, just for one night. My wedding ring had been a bit tight, so I'd been wearing it on my little finger, but I knew it would fall off in the pool so I put it back on my ring finger while we 'swam' (translation, we walked up and down the pool holding one or other of our children and being splashed in the face repeatedly). I forgot to swap the ring back afterwards, probably because I was breastfeeding naked in the changing room.

That evening, we were too tired to go to the restaurant so we ordered room service. As we were waiting for the food to arrive, I realised my finger had swollen and I could no longer take my wedding ring off. We tried soap to no avail. We were considering phoning the fire brigade as my finger swelled further, until my husband remembered the minibar. So it was that I ate dinner one-handed, with my left hand frozen to the inside of the minibar freezer compartment while my husband wrangled the two kids and we laughingly wished each other a 'happy anniversary'. The fire brigade were, fortunately, not needed.

A few further notes on strategies we have used for trying to sleep in hotel rooms with young children:
- ideally you want two rooms, one that you can shut the kids in, another that you can watch TV in or at least where you can keep a light on to talk to each other if they ever go to sleep. Often hotel configurations and finances do not allow for this.
- second option: create 'two rooms' by any means possible. Put the cot in the bathroom. Drape the heavy curtains round the cot(s). Sit in the bath together watching TV on a tablet. Utilise the hallway space and shunt a wardrobe to one side to block it off. Escape to the balcony if it exists.
- if two rooms are not possible, you have the joy of sitting silently in the dark, praying for the kids to go to sleep so you can watch something under the duvet with headphones on.
- if all else fails, just go to sleep when the kids do.

I feel like hotels could and should do much better with the type of family rooms provided.

[Balderdasha]

Yep, academics who believed that whatever we were getting up to, they'd rather we were doing it on their own premises. There were a few sets of parents like that. One of them had converted the basement into a party room, complete with a large one-armed bandit that they'd managed to remove from the pub. It still needed pound coins to operate it, but we treated it as communal cash. When we got hungry, we raided the back and ordered pizza.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Those are some indulgent parents that your boyfriend had!

[Balderdasha]

1999-2001: my boyfriend used to throw lots of all-night / two day house parties. His parents were often away for the weekend and there was an unspoken agreement that we could do what we like as long as the house looked the same when they got back on Sunday evening. Snippets from this period:

- the house party where we had all the Russian exchanges staying, including one who was genuinely called Igor. He got bored and wandered off to a nearby pub, was returned by police around 3am. The police officer was essentially carrying him and greeted us with 'Is this yours?'

- the one where my friend took an electric kettle, filled it with water and put it on the gas hob to boil. Several stoned people watched the resulting pretty fire before anyone realised to dump it in the sink. Spent most of Sunday driving round trying to find an identical replacement kettle, and scraping molten plastic off the kitchen floor.

- watching sunrise from the sofa in the garden, or the treehouse, while drunken teenage boys dared each other to jump off the extension roof. Amazing that no-one broke an ankle.

- the party where people got a bit artsy and we had to spend all of Sunday repainting the walls in the back hallway.

- the one where my boyfriend had a major nose bleed all down the carpeted stairs, and we had to try every trick in the book to get the stains out ('try white wine', 'no, salt', 'no, bicarbonate of soda')

- the party that ended the parties. We had a big bonfire going in the back garden and were making fireballs out of half beer cans filled with vegetable oil, with a lit piece of string as a wick, and throwing water at the flaming oil. We accidentally burned / blew a hole in the back lawn and didn't have the expertise to returf it before my boyfriend's dad returned. He really liked his lawn.

[Balderdasha]

2015: a few days after the heavily-laden trip through the underground, I woke up in the middle of the night on our inflated mattress having contractions. I was only 35 weeks pregnant. 5 weeks before due date. 2 weeks before you're considered 'full-term'. I thought they were maybe Braxton Hicks contractions, but they started getting more intense and more frequent. After a couple of hours in a warm bath, with paracetamol not taking the edge off them at all, we started using an app to time the contractions and realised they were close enough together that I'd need to go into hospital. My parents-in-law came round to look after the kids. They are hypochondriacs so I found myself bouncing up and down on a yoga ball, in extreme pain, vomiting politely into a Tupperware pot and reassuring them that I was sure it was probably nothing to worry about.

My father-in-law drove us into hospital where there was mild alarm because my records hadn't yet arrived from the previous hospital I was registered with. Once we jumped that particular hurdle, they admitted me and confirmed that yes, I appeared to be in labour. However, because I was at 35 not 37 weeks, the doctors did everything possible to bring me out of early onset labour. I was put on a drip and given various medications. We realised it was possible that I'd been triggered by eating reheated Chinese food the day before (as we'd just moved house we didn't know where any of the cooking stuff was yet and were living off takeaway). I was an inpatient for three days while they gradually brought my contractions down. It was the most rest and relaxation I'd had for years.

Over the following week, there were a couple of false starts, and then it seemed that my son gave up on all attempts to make an entrance. He was eventually born by caesarian almost seven weeks later when I was 12 days overdue.

After that caesarian, one of the midwives suggested discharging me after less than two days. We'd done the requisite 24 hours on the post-natal ward, where this time my husband was allowed to stay by my bedside on a reclining chair, but he wasn't allowed to snore, which meant he wasn't allowed to sleep, and then booked the private room. Being out of London meant it was only £250 a night, which we considered money well-spent. When the midwife suggested I left, I laughed at her and said, no thanks, I still want access to oral morphine and my IKEA bed isn't being delivered until tomorrow.

The day we came home I sat on the newly arrived second-hand sofa with my son for 12 hours, while my husband and my dad built me a bed.

[Balderdasha]

Later in 2015: we realised it would be too crowded in our two-bed flat for another baby, and we couldn't afford anything bigger in London. So, like everyone else in our situation, we joined the exodus to the home counties. The aim was to move in the middle trimester; I've generally stopped vomiting around the fifth month, but I'm not yet as big as a house. But predictably, these things always take longer than they should and we ended up moving when I was eight months pregnant.

Our old landlords were money-grabbing soulless vampires, so I went back to London with my daughter one day to oversee the final inspection that would determine if we got our deposit back (as it turned out, we lucked out because the letting agent lost the original copy of the inventory so they couldn't prove what condition the flat was in when we rented it, and we got everything back, but I didn't know that was going to happen). I think my husband was away with work. My daughter had one last session in her nursery that day and then at night I slept next to her on a bare mattress in an entirely empty flat. The next day I travelled through the London tube network with a pushchair, a rucksack, a suitcase and a toddler, remember while eight months pregnant. I would not recommend this.

The house we moved into had no furniture and, having previously been in a furnished flat, we also had no furniture, other than our daughter's cot and the rocking chair that I used for breastfeeding. For the next month we slept alternately on an old mattress, or an inflatable mattress that we got from Argos which deflated in the middle of the night. Again, not recommended for the last months of pregnancy when it's a struggle even to stand up from a full-size bed. My parents-in-law tried to help us out by buying a second-hand bed that looked beautiful on the box, but when it arrived it turned out to be box two of two and only contained the headboard.

These uncomfortable conditions contributed to my next story.

[Balderdasha]

2001: I was working several jobs, trying to raise money for my trip to South America, so I had an unusual daily routine.

Get up around 4am, then my dad would drive me to the post office sorting office where I was working sorting pre-Christmas post from 5am to 1pm. This varied between mind-numbing standing by the conveyor belts sorting letters into first class and second class (the only occasional distraction was a postcard which everyone passed round to read. The best one was a woman complaining that her daughter dropped their parrot down the toilet.) and actual manual labour lugging huge bales of junk mail magazines off the lorries and onto metal trollies. Sometimes you'd get the light relief of hurling parcels across the package room. Even if they said 'fragile' or 'warning chemical substances' and were leaking, that still got thrown around. At least the canteen did a decent and cheap breakfast when we had our break at 10am. The warehouse radio mainly played Kylie Minogue's 'can't get you out of my head' on loop very loudly.

After that shift, I would get the bus into town, go to Sainsbury's and complete my daily challenge of buying myself lunch for under £1 (favourite combo was a banana for 10p and a tin of kiddy cartoon shape spaghetti hoops for 25p. I was semi-anorexic, tiny and skint). Then, I went to the local branch of Waterstones, up to the second floor where there was a sofa in the kids area, lay down under my coat, set the alarm on my phone for one hour's time and fell asleep. I did this every weekday for about six months and I was only woken up once by a member of staff who asked if I was ok, and I just said 'I'm fine thanks' and went back to sleep.

After the alarm went off, I got another bus to my second job, which was working at an after-school playscheme between 3 and 6pm. There was a little five year old boy who arrived every day, threw down his school bag, ran straight to the dressing up area, put on a skirt, a straw hat and a red handbag, and then gave me lectures about the origins of black holes. I often had to be responsible for another little boy who wore a safety helmet the whole time because he fitted most days. I had to put him in the recovery position when he did, mop up his blood, comfort him when he woke up disorientated. I was in no way adequately trained for this (I was 19).

Once all the kids had been collected by their parents, I cleaned up, did the washing up, then got another bus to my third job. This was door-to-door marketing for a water charity. I drove a big blue van around the villages, filled with water bottles and knocked on every door in a specified street, 7-9pm. I handed out free bottles of water and got people to complete a questionnaire about their water drinking habits. It was all nonsense, the only purpose was to get people's phone numbers so the real salespeople could phone them later. It amazed me how many people didn't slam the door in my face. Old people would answer the door saying 'my children tell me not to answer the door to strangers, but you look sweet' and I felt like telling them they should really listen to their children. I gave that job up after a few months because it started getting dark in the evenings and I didn't feel so safe knocking on strangers' doors.

I would get the bus home, arrive around 10pm, pass out often fully clothed, rinse and repeat.

[Balderdasha]

Summer 2015. Early pregnancy does not suit me well. The nausea gradually ramps up until I'm vomiting several times throughout the day, often with zero warning, so I've thrown up in bins on Clapham high street, over the railings of a very prestigious looking building near the London oratory, in a park next to a startled dog, etc. It was bad enough the first time round without the added complication of looking after a rambunctious two-year-old at the same time. During my second pregnancy I would often find myself crouched over the toilet bowl, holding my own hair out of the way, while my daughter climbed on my back cheerfully shouting 'giddy up horsie!'

Anyway, among the myriad other unpleasant symptoms that pregnancy brings, one afternoon I found myself experiencing fairly intense chest pains. I waited until my husband got home from work, then we agreed that I should go to a&e. Fortunately I had stopped breastfeeding my daughter the month before (some people manage breastfeeding and pregnancy at the same time, for my body it was too much and I thought she'd had a very good run). So off I toddled on my own in a taxi, imagining that I would only be in hospital a couple of hours.

In A&E, I was seen to quite quickly (I think the words 'pregnant' and 'chest pains' put you quite high up the triage system) and they gave me an ECG. The results came back suggesting that I might have had a minor heart attack. I was not expecting that at all. Suddenly, I was admitted overnight and facing a whole raft of unpleasant exploratory tests on my own. I don't remember them all, but I know there were more ECGs, I had a cannula put in (I have thin veins, it took them several painful attempts), I was on drips, they injected me with radioactive dye for one scan (I think MRI), I had x-rays of my lungs in case of blood clots. These were all scheduled throughout the night so I didn't sleep. I spent the time inbetween sorting out childcare arrangements for my daughter the next day. My husband could drop her at her morning nursery session before work but then I had to arrange a mosaic of relatives to collect her and look after her for the afternoon.

Embarrassingly, at the end of all the many investigations, the conclusion was that all I had was pregnancy heartburn. I had had heartburn in my previous pregnancy, but that presented in a recognisable way, with rising bile. I didn't know that heartburn could present just as chest pain. The original ECG which scared the medics was put down as a rogue result. I was discharged around 4:30pm the following day with omeprazole and standard antacids, and must have slept for a good 12 hours.

[Balderdasha]

I remember meeting you and Janik, I don't remember doing a pub quiz though. I think I've met OTFers three or four times so far. Callie, TG and a couple of others in Cambridge once. One or maybe two pub outings in London. None of them were boring evenings.

I remembered another OTFer I met in a London pub once, Tubby Isaacs. He doesn't seem to be posting much any more. Anyone know how he is?

[Balderdasha]

Spring 2015: another wedding. This time it was Sally, the girl I shared a flat with part-time in Chongqing. The church had a great kids area where my daughter could play with toys and read books to stop her squawking at inappropriate times. I accidently got into a "sing-off" with the groom's sister-in-law. I was standing, minding my own business, singing the hymns at a normal volume, when she came and stood right next to me, singing conspicuously louder. I used to sing in church choirs all the time as a child, and she'd already annoyed me by forcing her four-year-old son to read "hairy maclairy" out loud in a bored monotone just to prove he could, so I matched her volume. She increased the volume again. I matched it again. It got a bit silly.

Anyway, after the ceremony, we all went in a bus to the hotel where the reception was being held. This time we had managed to book a room in that very hotel, not 17 miles away. We ate dinner, put our daughter in her pyjamas and repeated the trick of walking her around in her pushchair until she slept. We parked her in the corner, drank a little champagne, had a bit of a dance. It really was a lovely wedding and we got a bit soppy and romantic. We'd survived over 18 months of parenting, surely we'd been through the worst of it? Maybe we could even contemplate trying for another baby.

5am in our hotel room, we were rudely awoken by the sound of vomiting. My husband again displayed his lightning fast emergency reactions and had leaped out of bed, grabbed our daughter out of the cot and into the shower before the worst of the projectile vomiting had started. She had full-blown gastroenteritis. Foolishly, we still met friends for lunch, and she threw up everywhere there as well. On the train journey back, inbetween mopping up vomit and administering calpol syringes full of dioralyte, we laughed at how unrealistic we were the previous night. Clearly we were not ready to cope with two children.

It was too late, I was already pregnant with my son.

[Balderdasha]

An old one, and an odd one. 2002 again, when I was touring South America with some friends. We were in Northern Peru, staying on the beach for a couple of days before we were due to cross the border into Ecuador on foot. I was sharing a room with my boyfriend and also another male friend who was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. We had a load of weed that we couldn't cross the border with so we tried to smoke too much of it and then conked out late at night. It was hot so I think I was only wearing knickers and a t-shirt when I went to sleep. When I woke up, it was pitch black and a strange guy was standing next to my bed stroking my thighs. I was too dazed to really process it, so I just tapped my boyfriend on the arm and said "hey, there's a guy in our room". As soon as I spoke, the intruder ran and crouched down at the foot of the bed. I became more conscious, sat up and shouted "hey, there's someone in our room" and the guy leapt to his feet and jumped out of the sliding door to the beach. It's worth noting here that I have truly atrocious short-sight, requiring glasses or contact lenses to see anything further away than my palm pressed against my nose, so the only thing I knew about the guy was that he was quite tall and skinny. My boyfriend was vaguely awake by this time, and my male friend woke up enough to close the sliding door and lock it. We all went back to sleep, my boyfriend cuddled me and I shuddered slightly.

In the morning, I started talking about what had happened at breakfast and became gradually more furious as both my boyfriend and the other male friend questioned whether it had actually happened. I was stoned, it could have been a dream, maybe I saw something else because of my eyesight. By the time we got back to the room and discovered that both guys wallets were missing, I felt only a smug sense of "I told you so".

Investigating proved complicated. Our tour guide knew the owner of the hotel. The owner was indignant that something like that might have happened in his hotel. He had a guy patrolling the beach to prevent this sort of thing. The patrol guard was duly summoned who claimed he had seen our tour guide's other friend enter the room several times and hadn't said anything because he knew we were friends. I knew very little about this friend except that he was short and stocky, not tall and thin like the guy I had seen. It seemed unlikely. The possibility was raised that the cleaners had stolen the wallets while we were at breakfast. Police arrived to take our tour guide's friend for questioning. The tour guide desperately explained to me that that meant they would try and torture a confession out of him.

By this point I had no clue who had stolen wallets and fondled me, why or when. It didn't make sense. Did someone come into the room to steal wallets and then risked revealing themselves just to stroke a woman's leg? But, I didn't think it was the stocky guy and I didn't want him to be tortured even if he was guilty, so I gave evidence to the police that it wasn't him. Our last day in the hotel was fairly awkward, but we gave the owner our remaining weed as a goodwill gesture, and in turn he drove us to the border.

I am pretty lucky that in terms of "Metoo" stories, that's as bad as it gets for me, but I still had surreal dreams about it for months afterwards, and got a bit obsessive about checking that doors and windows were locked.

[WOM]

I drove to Florida once with an inexperienced driver who'd never driven manual/stick before. When I'd finally gone as far as I could - somewhere in the mountains of Virginia (West Virginia?) - we swapped places. I talked him up to highway speed ("Okay, clutch, shift...let out the clutch. Clutch, shift to third, let out the clutch. Clutch, shift to fourth....", etc) and climbed into the back seat and went to sleep. I woke up about four hours later, and it's pitch black and the water is bucketing down in biblical volumes. 18 wheelers are screaming by, throwing up waterfalls of spray on both sides, headlights and taillights glaring on the wet windows. The whole bit. And he's white-knuckled with both hands on the wheel, face pressed against the windshield in a rictus scream of blind panic. So, I talked him over to the side of the road and swapped back. He shook for the next hour as he chain smoked and then fell asleep. Poor bugger. I'd slept like a log, mind.

[Balderdasha]

That's triggered another memory. Probably sometime around 2006. There are Chinese buses that have bunk beds in them. Double-decker bunks along each side and then two long beds at the back that you can squeeze about four people on side by side. I have no idea where I was going from or to, or who with, I just remember marvelling that I slept the whole night pressed against male strangers and no-one attempted to fondle me.

[ChrisJ]

Like most people who’ve travelled on a budget, I’ve spent uncomfortable but unremarkable nights in cars, bus shelters, on station platforms, traffic islands or sometimes hillsides or beaches. The wettest was in a monastery on Emei Shan in Sichuan. The one I’m proudest fo surviving was on a waiting room floor on Delhi Cantt Station. The scariest was on a bus.

It was 2012. I’d been trekking in Ladakh, stayed longer than intended and was late to meet a friend in Ambala. So I decided to do the one-push trip from Leh to Manali. It’s 500km on dicey roads and usually done in two days with an overnight break at a dhaba somewhere.

The bus left at 2am filled with about a dozen or so Israelis, the four Ladakhi crew and me. In my dozy early-hours daze, I’d forgotten that the road south from Leh crosses a number of passes and a plateau, at times over 5000m. So, fucking cold - especially at night, and I’d only pushed a light fleece into my daypack. My warmer stuff was in my rucksack, lashed to the roof of the bus under everyone else’s kit as my obsession with being on time had got me there and loaded first.

After a bit it became apparent that the bus wasn’t in a good a state. For a kick-off, the windows didn’t close, so as we rattled along, the frigid night air poured through the gaps and added to my misery. Then, just as I’d got my shivering into sufficient sync to wonder if I might grab some kip, the electrics on the bus failed. The crew spent 20 minutes unspooling spaghettied wires from beneath the dashboard before deciding that a full moon-and-torch combo gave them all the light they needed. They were largely untroubled by the sudden deceleration and splash when we drove into a small river. They were, necessarily, more taken aback by the boulder we smashed in to, which buckled some unspecified bit of the undercarriage, and brought us to halt.

About an hour of sub-zero rock-wedging, levering; smashing things with stones to shift or reshape them, then winding them with (possibly, redundant electrical) wire to hold them in place, and we moved off again. But more slowly now. In some respects this was a plus as it felt safer. On the other hand, it was more sleepless shivering and we were losing time, which later came to be significant.

Finally it became light and we were able to stop for tea and another session of wedging, levering and bashing. It became apparent that we were suffering from some damage to the suspension that required us to limp along for the rest of the day, the driver correcting a continual veer to the right and making frequent repair stops. We should have been at Manali by mid-evening, but when we reached Keylong it was already starting to get dark. Ahead of us was the Rohtang La which we’d intended to cross by daylight. And the lights still weren’t working.

It started to rain, which as we ascended the road towards the pass, turned to snow. It was late August and stretches of the road had been turned by glacial melt and monsoon rain into rutted, semi-liquid slush and mud. Repeatedly, we slid towards the ragged, indeterminate, unprotected, edge of the road. Each time, the driver hauled on the wheel and we slid gently on, regardless. And each time, at the last moment we somehow gained enough traction to slew back from the black chasm on our right.

It was now dark but the occasional oncoming lights were no relief. They just reminded us how narrow the road, how treacherous the surface and how little control the drivers actually had. I think one of the Israelis started to pray. Then it went quiet. It was late, but no-one was sleeping. I got a brief, nervous laugh when I asked aloud if anyone surviving the fall could post my diary to my wife. It was obviously a joke. No-one survives that drop. Someone asked the Ladakhis to go back. They said no, it would be impossible to turn around and to stop would be dangerous…

A second night without sleep. In all honesty, I was less worried by my own lack of rest than that of the drivers. They were now rotating every 10 minutes through sheer exhaustion. Finally, as I believed I’d descended in to some previously unrecorded Buddhist Hell, the surface suddenly improved, lights appeared and after nearly 300 miles and 22 hours on the road - but only just on the road - we trundled into Manali.

It was the middle of the night again, so the usual gang of helpful auto-drivers were absent from the bus station. I walked up the road until I saw a hotel with a light on. It was a swanky affair that usually charged Rs1700 a room. I’d been living on less than Rs1200 per day but I didn’t care by then. The room had a shower, a massive TV, curtains, tiled floor, working lights and wifi, but I took no advantage of the luxury. Next day when I surfaced at around 10am, the owner said he’d only charge me Rs800 as the place was empty. He gave me breakfast for Rs50 and talked cricket for two hours, claiming to be related to Vikram Rathour, who I had to look up later, and repeatedly advancing the claim that Allan Lamb was the greatest English batsman of the last 30 years.

[Balderdasha]

Is there a two hour limit in all of them? Surely tired drivers should be encouraged to sleep instead of potentially putting themselves and others at risk. Is space so limited or is it just profit making?

The two hour limit on parking spaces triggered another memory.

2009: I was living in Camden with the graffiti boyfriend. A load of his friends were planning a trip camping and surfing in Cornwall. I didn't fancy surfing but the idea of a beach holiday appealed. I hired a car and, after a long day at work, started driving my boyfriend and two of his friends down to Cornwall. I'd forgotten how far the drive was, especially as the sole driver. Around 11pm, I announced that we'd have to stop as I wasn't safe to drive any more. We tried to book rooms at a Travelodge, but there were no spaces available so we just kipper in the car at the car park. I didn't know about the two hour limit and we slept maybe four hours before setting off again.

The holiday itself was a mixed bag. The campsite had a coin-operated hot shower and we never had enough twenty pence pieces for a decent wash. There was a German couple staying with us. Their tent fell apart on the first day, but the guy resurrected all the tent poles as an amazing ramshackle barbecue. Fortunately, some of the other guys had a massive scout troop style tent that everyone could bunk down in. We all sat in there in the evening smoking weed and reading stories from Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk.

One evening, me and my boyfriend booked a tasting menu session at Jamie Oliver's restaurant. We rocked up in flip flops and beach gear, with matted hair from the lack of shower, and enjoyed the looks of mild disgust on the faces of the other diners. I remember the olives tasting particularly good. On the days the others went surfing, I built a huge sandcastle with a cheerful, slightly tubby mechanic.

The only thing that really bugged me, was that the couple who cadged a lift off us didn't offer to pay for any of the petrol. They spent a long time bemoaning how little money they had and then bought themselves brand new, top of the range surfing outfits. I asked my boyfriend to talk to them about it, but he was someone who always avoided confrontation and he demurred.

The drive back was another long slog, but at least another guy hitched a lift and he could actually map read (my boyfriend had never driven so having him in the passenger seat was worse than useless). We failed to return the car in time the next morning and got fined about £200 for that infringement, so when the fine for staying in the Travelodge carpark too long came through a week later I was less than impressed. I think the car hire company also claimed for a non-existent scratch.

My poor husband wonders why I'm so against renting cars.

[JVL]

The memory of another weird evening has just surfaced in my mind and must be recorded for posterity before it sinks again under the weight of non-league trivia and the terminology for the tedious project I'm working on at the moment.

Anyway. It was the spring of 2003 and a few of us flew to Barcelona for the weekend to see the city and get in a game at the Camp Nou. We booked an eight-bed room in a youth hostel near Las Ramblas and, in a totally unsurprising turn of events, both days started off sedately enough before turning into total nonsense. The city: fantastic, so much to see. The food and drink: equally marvellous. The football: the match (against Sevilla, I think) was pretty meh but just being in that stadium was an experience in itself. Some of the gentlemen in our party retired at a sensible time, reminding the rest of us that the hostel had a curfew and we had to be back by midnight or 1am, or spend the night locked out. That seemed like more of a challenge than a threat, so I think it was four of us decided to push on through. One of our number enjoyed a dip in the rooftop pool of a city-centre hotel simply by marching through reception like he owned the place and straight into the elevator (would most probably not be possible today with key-card access restrictions), we fended off the attentions of some ladies of negotiable affection offering blow jobs for a Euro our poor planning meant that we finished off down at the harbour/marina, a long way from anywhere open (and of course we had no real idea of where we were in relation to the rest of the city). Walking back along a main thoroughfare, the sound of subway trains could be heard emanating from the steps down to a station. My Mackem mate and I decided to take a look, legged it down the stairs, hurdled the barriers and jumped on a train just as it was pulling out. We must have fallen asleep fairly quickly, and woke up a couple of hours later, in total darkness. The train was in sidings somewhere, and the driver had either not checked or just decided to leave us where we were. What to do but wipe the drool off your chin and go back to sleep? Woke again as the train was trundling through the town, got a few curious looks from commuters, and then back out into the morning sun and off for breakfast.