Breakfast: 2 paracetamol and a strong pot of coffee

I am so tired. It was a sleep-free affair for me this weekend and as much as I'd like to say it's cos I'm so hard that I was out indulging till the wee smalls and getting only a few hours kip so I could wake up, hurl, then go and have a breakfast of questionable nutritional value at one of the larger fast-food chains, I can't. It doesn't sound anywhere near as exciting for me to say that I was woken up very early by a small child who hasn't learned to tell time yet. The thing is, that when Little Miss L decides she's awake, me sending her to the naughty corner and explaining that getting up at 5:20 is not 'asseptible behaviour' would be as unfair as it is pointless. You can, with some persuasion, get children to eat when they're not hungry (sugar is the key) but there's nothing sweet you can sprinkle on a bed to make a wide-awake child lie still for 20 seconds, let alone make them doze off dreaming of Thomas, holding bunny, while snuggled up in their favourite blankie. Of course there's still all the things to do that you have to do, so the thing that misses out is my leisure time. No more Sudoku puzzles for me till I catch up on some sleep (I did one on the train last week out of boredom and I'm kind of hooked. I can't wait till I'm sick of doing them; they're so much less satisfying than cryptic crosswords). The other thing that starts to go is my concentration. I was in a meeting today and looked out the window at a tree. I noticed it still had some leaves hanging on, despite autumn ending (... I've forgotten what month this is...) a while ago. I remembered that it started dropping its leaves in January, then I started drifting off, wondering if you took a potted tree to the northern hemisphere, whether it would get some kind of arboreal jetlag and start blooming at the wrong time of year, or whether, if you just followed summer with it, it would just burn out and die from year-round photosynthesis. Surely trees need sleep too. But unlike me, they don't have some little sapling tugging at their branches asking them to blossom in fucking June.