I had a day trip over to Stockholm last week, to meet a company who do audio book versions of medical textbooks. Yes! Nine years of education pay off with the perfect job combination! Finally! I knew I'd done all those extra exams for a reason.
Or, well, finally pending a test recording of me reading out ten solid pages of anatomy. You have to add your own little descriptive notes to figure captions, saying what you can see and dropping in helpful explanations. This is quite hard. Reading out two-paragraph-long sentences containing nothing but eight-syllable words is bad enough, but improvising helpful notes on pictures of naked anatomy models really stymied me. "She looks kind of bored? And her haircut is from the seventies." I think that's a vital part of the learning medicine experience.
It's very odd, turning up in another city for a few hours for an audition. Or interview, this was both, really. I get the two terms very confused these days, in the same way that my brain confuses exam and performance stress. Before a show, I dream of sitting naked in an exam hall, unable to read the paper. I don't have so many exams these days, but before other life stresses, like moving house, I dream of being naked on stage, unable to produce any lines. I clearly have some nudity issues to address.
Swedish trains are fantastic. It's fairly surreal to wake up on a train, watching the eerily blue and white snowclad forests rushing by like something from a Russian classic. It's even more surreal when the carriage is mostly decked out in polished wood and has actual compartments. There was an honest-to-god restaurant car. The couple opposite me spent the whole journey in there, doubtless sipping Gibsons with Eva Marie Saint and making smart alec remarks about their lives in marketing.
I was almost overcome with surreality when I went to the toilet. The window was open a crack, and the room was chilly, unlike the rest of the toasty carriage. Someone had filled the bin with beer, left it there to chill. But that wasn't the weird thing. The weird thing was that the entire toilet was spotless, everything worked and it didn't stink of unflushed poo and urinal cakes. And there was no graffiti.
What kind of a crazy world is this? I'm putting it down to the continued sleep deprivation. I read that article in the Guardian yesterday, the one that tells us lack of sleep turns all our genes off. No wonder I feel like I've devolved recently.
Freja sleeps fairly well when she wants to. Sadly, what she'd rather have is devoted attention. She's gone off the pacifier, she insists on having a little finger to suck on instead. And it only counts if you also hold her ten centimetres away from your face and talk to her whilst maintaining unblinking eye contact. Anything less than that and she starts filling out adoption papers.
It's not in any way that we aren't dedicated to her whims. Far from it; I'm also thankful for the unique historical viewpoint it gives me into the lives of Louis XV's courtiers. But come 0400, when your arms are cramping from holding her and you're terrified you might fall asleep standing up and drop her as your grip relaxes and she is still shouting at you because your finger is two degrees off the perfect suction angle, then it's easy to see why the waking world seems to be viewed through a glass of cloudy cider and my eyes and spine have fused into a single hotrod of tired pain. These are indeed the days when you wish your bed was already made.
F is protected from all this by some kind of genetic barrier. Sleep deprivation may have shut down our pancreases (pancreai?), but it has activated a bunch of hard-coded parental behaviours that divert all our frustration and anxiety on to each other instead. It's the same gene that convinces me I'm not in pain when F swings on my armpit hair, or prevents V from running shrieking into the next country after a particularly bulldog-like breastfeeding session.
She's still totally worth it, of course. I had a lovely conversation with her, during one of the finger-sucking staring matches last night. She has a grunting language that she speaks round the edges of my fingernails. It sounds a bit like a recitation of all the Inuit words for snow. No idea where she picked it up, but she's clearly a towering genius.
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