I’m sure that you will, at one time or another, have come across and been amused by Hannah Hillam’s ‘Are you going to sleep?’ cartoon meme, with the brain acquiring its own separate existence, floating above the bed and saying or asking something that wakes the girl up to eye-saucer-wide alertness. Such astute insights remind me that many of us experience sleeplessness and devise ways of overcoming it.

Often, when I can’t sleep, I play word games by making up a set of rules and then searching in my mind for words which adhere to them. Sometimes my hit rate is spectacular; on other occasions, I simply fall asleep – which is the object of the exercise, unless the game grows so interesting that I willingly become wider and wider awake. (Occasionally, I draft in my husband, who is usually initially annoyed at being disturbed, but then enters into the spirit of the current game with gusto, adding – to my annoyance, his own rules.  😉)

The following day, I usually remember the rules of the game, but the words themselves have floated away into the ether. Today, I have made a special effort to remember the words from a game I’ve been playing over the past several nights, substituting new ones when the originals, despite much brain-racking, have been lost. 

I’ve turned my set of words into a very short story, just for fun. I thought my readers might like to share with me a spot of hilarity as we approach the happy season of what has been the most sombre year, I guess, that any of us can remember.

Can you spot the word rule that I used? And what leeway I gave myself?

Enjoy!

Revolutionary and somewhat farinaceous Lady Louise, succumbing to a year-long compulsion of god-daughterliness, met the ambidextrous quantity surveyor bivouacked beside a zinziberaceous crematorium for equatorial hippopotamuses. He was voyeuristically observing the trouble-making kindergarten nurse, full of maliciousness, separating out xiphopaguses by the washing-house as she, importunate, planned a pre-accusation, much to his unexpectation – and later nauseation, although  supported by documentation – that he had stolen her oleaginous juice-extractor.