Then take your money

At the start of this week, my sleep pattern was all over the place. For some reason, I seem unable to sleep for more than five hours without waking; if I'm lucky I can then doze off again. If not, I'm faced with the choice of either tossing and turning until dawn or going with it, reading or going online until it's time to get up. Worst case scenario: I doze off an hour before it's time to get up then rise and stagger off to work, zombie-like, feeling like I haven't slept at all.

Anyway. I made the mistake, at around 3am Monday, of logging on and perusing the online Guardian - then getting sucked into all the credit crunch/recession/depression panic. Now, my job and mortgage are reeeasonably safe - at least at the moment - but at 3am, one's sense of perspective can become skewed and one's moodometer tends toward Vague Existential Dread. Which is what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, too (last night, I forbade myself from taking the laptop upstairs, which did the trick).

I've always been shit with money and don't really understand basic economics. Turns out that the same is true of quite a few of us (including several who Do Something In The City). I'm always amazed at (and often slightly suspicious of) people who're able to save the sort of sums being "guaranteed" by our own and other European governments. My financial crapness has, I suppose, been a protective factor in terms of shielding me from anxiety. I did, however, during my 3am insomnia jaunts, find myself looking up "recession" on Wikipedia and Googling "how will the credit crunch affect me?"

On balance, I think it's better not to know. Denial is good.

More angst: it's rumoured that, at the end of this (first) series of No Heroics, simian-summoning Thundermonkey will die.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

No Heroics is a bit hit-and-miss (which, for an ITV sitcom, is superlative) in terms of laughs but the cast is likeable and, for a comics geek like me, the in-jokes are wonderful (Shazamstell! Gin City! Von Doomenbrau!). And Jim Howick as Thundermonkey is the sexiest thing in the show. Here're some bits from the first episode:



Considering whether or not to do Vauxhallville again this week. I'll be sticking around after work for a colleague's leaving drinks so will have to watch my intake...