Insomnia - your friend and mine. Just to clear things up, I'd like to establish one thing, for anyone else dumb enough to try it.

   Over the last six months, my body clock has been totally out of order - my body clock has been totally out of whack, running about five hours sleep. I've no idea why - that's the joys of body clocks, you can't tell when they're running slow, when the spring's knackered, when you're in need of a decent wind-up, or any of the normal time functions. But the proof has been there - I've been getting to sleep, feeling tired at about 5am - not exactly ideal.

   Anyway, thanks to this and various other odds and sods (I may rant about them some other time, and if so I'll link to them from here) I've been a pretty radical mess on sleep and schedules this year. It's not been fun, and I honestly wouldn't recommend it to even my worst enemies.

   So, this weekend when I had two other friends here, I decided that it might be an ideal opportunity to try a reset on the body-clock. So on the Saturday into Sunday, when they were leaving to travel on up to Scotland at 5am, it seemed like a really smart idea to not bother sleeping that night at all, get through to Sunday night, and hopefully be tired and ready for sleep, and let the body-clock reset itself that way.

   Well, it went OK. I got through the entire 40 odd hours awake, not even feeling too rough. Got through to 10pm, 11pm, midnight - and still not tired. For fucks sake, the body's been going for far too close to two solid days, so why the hell am I not tired? But no - in the end it gets to 5am (STILL!) and I'm finally tired enough to go to bed/sleep, and so I know even then that the clock hasn't reset. Totally fecking disastrous bit of planning.

   In fact, all it's done is meant I had a night without any sleep. The bodyclock still thinks 5am is a good time to go to sleep, my eyeballs still look like the proverbial pissholes in the snow, I'm considering starting a line of luggage with a design based on the suitcases under my eyes, and the entire lack of sleep has left me with nothing else. What a stunning plan.

   All of a sudden, I've realised why I'm not a master tactician, will never be a military planner, and generally I'm just flaming doomed when it comed to these ideas. So I'm giving up on simple plans like "stay awake, you twat", and instead I think I might just go for the option where I fly off to the US, where my body clock being 5 hours slow is likely to be a benefit, considering that the entire right-hand coast (West? East? I wish I could remember which way round they went) is (by a thankful coincidence) 5 hours behind UK time. At that point, spending some time over there (I wonder if I can get BUPA or someone similar to pay for it, because it'll have some medical uses for me, anyway!), then fly back to the UK, and see how the fight between jet-lag and body-clock goes.

   OK, it's not much of a plan either, but I think it's got slightly more chance of working. Well, at least it's got as much chance of working. Hell, if it had less chance of working, I'd probably be working for Arthur Andersen accounting or Enron.

   *sigh*