48 Hours Sleepless In Selly

Start 10:47 Thursday

End 11ish* Saturday

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

* I wish I could be more precise on the time I fell asleep, but I can’t. I was knackered by then, clinging to my covers, tongue wagging, chanting Wreck-It Ralph quotes.

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep” said some bloke called E. Joseph Cossman. (Stupid name, sounds like he writes books on corporal punishment). Why he is an authority on fatigue is ambiguous, but he is.

Without that good night’s sleep, there is no bridge and that’s a damn shame.

It was watching me. Waiting. Taunting me. It knew.

Exam period/coursework deadlines/etc. It’s all coming up, and I was thinking about how a lot of students might be tempted to pull an all-nighter or two to try to bash out as much as they can. Academically speaking, of course.

Yes, it was generally surprisingly easy. Constant caffeinated drinks – excluding coffee, as that brings the lows and, depending on whom you believe, the shits – and audio-visual stimuli meant that the majority of the time, I was coasting through, a little tired but no more than you could be on a normal day.

However, the two occasions I got tired, I got really tired. See below.

My parents are proud.

In the library attempting to do The Right Thing and work, I found my head lolling in the manner not dissimilar to the Churchill dog and cried with laughter when confronted with an essay question. It was the funniest thing since 2010 for me, but for those around me I was a nutcase who got his rocks off to pdf documents.

How someone could possibly revise in a state like that, I am clueless.

I talked to my camera even though it was off the majority of the time. I made video reviews of adverts. Adverts! I put on nu-metal music and pretended I was a person who liked nu-metal music. I acted as if I had my own cooking/reality TV show: Keeping Up With The Kock.

Me at about 32 hours in

I filmed onions cooking in a pan like David effing Attenborough dwelling on some beautiful new discovery.

I filmed my stairs at one point. Just my stairs. You know what people have never said ever? “Ooh, stairs, they’re interesting. I love to watch the stairs.” There is a reason.

I attempted to make soup. It looked like vom, it tasted like vom, it might well have actually been vom.

My attempt at soup…

I pissed approx. 287 times an hour.

I thought watching a lot of American comedies would help, as these are very dumb and very loud, and so I watched Wreck-It Ralph, Identity Thief, Friends, Frasier, Rules of Engagement, How I Met Your Mother and Hot Tub Time Machine. It did help, but it meant I started speaking in a clipped, sarcastic tone and acting like the end of my experiment would be epic and backed with an orchestra.

In reality, it sort of fizzled out.

A bit like this article. I’m done.

My advice: do not do it. Especially not 2-in-a-row. Unless you’re chock full of El Chapo’s finest stimulants, you won’t find it a useful process.