Dead Bodies

Sometimes I wake in the wee small hours and fret.  It is as if I have woken up completely, except for my sense of proportion which is still firmly dormant.  It was a relief to find there was an old English word for these ‘worries before dawn’ – uhtceare.  I am not alone – the existence of an Anglo Saxon term shows others have shared this experience for at least a millennium, and probably much longer.

When the worry is something simple, like something I must remember to do, I have an effective remedy – I jot it down on a pad on my bedside table and return to sleep. 

On Tuesday morning I woke to my alarm, and although I couldn’t remember writing anything in the night, out of habit I glanced at the pad.  What I saw there shocked me.

‘Tell parents about dead bodies.’

This shocking memo meant nothing to me.  I checked the handwriting.  It was unmistakably mine. Had I been sleep-writing in a nightmare?  Was I going crazy?  I was so disturbed that I didn’t even mention it to Nigel.

It was only hours later, when I sat down to prepare a lesson that it finally clicked.  I was planning a museum trip for my school pupils, and there were human skeletons in one of the galleries.  Nowadays, one flags this up in case it might upset somebody.  With a grunt of relief, I added a sentence about human remains to the letter due to be sent out to parents.

At least now I could cross out ‘dead bodies’ from my list of uhtceare.