Nicotine, a dream and a dangerous coiled sausage...

For some reason I woke up at 3am this morning and stayed awake to 5am then slept in till 10.30am. Not the best start to the day but I think I must have taken my Trazadone too early, I'm also remembering the part of my recent courses on sleep that warns of nicotine withdrawal causing waking. I do have a fag last thing at night and it's almost always one of first things I do on waking.

I've also noticed that I'm dreaming. I thought for a long time that I didn't, so rarely did I remember dreams. But, I gather - only from the university of popular science on telly - that we do all dream. There's even an idea that people with depression suffer from the wrong sort of dreaming - I think it's the non-rapid eye movement type of dreaming that we are not aware of and tends to be darker. Well, in the last two nights I've remembered two dreams, probably because I woke at the end of each. The first was about a giant slug - an obsession of Mrs CD, who fights a long and attritional war against their many evil doings in the vegetable patch - I don't recall feeling particularly distressed by it. The second involved Charles I and me and some friends being chased by him across the recreation ground that was my chief playground as a child, the whole affair was narrated as if it was a television history documentary and as I woke I'd just given up making my escape while climbing under one of the fences into one of the gardens that adjoins the rec'. I've often had dreams in which I'm chased, besieged, hounded and persecuted - but as with the slug I had no sense of being very much distressed by the royal pursuit.

I was pleased with myself this morning though; after that fag I went and did 10 minutes of cycling on the exercise bike followed by a test to see how many press-ups and sit-ups I can do. If I'm going to take up a martial art I need to do some preparation I think and - fanfare - I can do 10 press-ups and 20 sit-ups. Mike Tyson I am not, but it's a start and exercise is good for alleviating depression.

D and C came round. D to look through some books I'm sending off to the charity shop and C just for a cup of coffee on their way to the pub and their well-established Sunday routine of a pub roast, a few pints then a session of smoking and listening to music from C's enormous and magnificent record collection. It was all very pleasant and easy and laughter was had all round.

Then an experimental lunch. Mrs CD and I popped into an African shop on the way home yesterday and picked up something that has been intriguing us. The shop seemed to sell very little apart from a cabinet full of some sort of curled sausage. Although the shop is run by black Africans said sausage - which is mighty in its dimension, such as gods will shudder at its sight - is an Afrikaner thing called a boerewors. They sat there in chili, garlic and plain variety and we started off, timidly with a plain, which I stuck in the onion with some onions, sage, garlic and peppers.

It was a qualified success - in that I really liked it and Mrs CD wasn't 100%, finding it a bit rich. It produced a hell of a lot of fat in cooking but that was easily dispensed with and from the consistency of the final product has a fair proportion of blood and offal in it. Mmm, blood and offal.

Cracking stuff. That's about all really. A short walk in the park, getting caught in a downpour on the way home. Mrs CD lasted all four odd hours of the tennis and I caught bits - very intense and close. Dinner. A bit of telly - Orangutans: I fecking love Orangutans, if you could buy them as pets I would and walk it every day.

Ah, ginger apes!

If you spent it thank you for your time. Apologies for being so dull at the moment - you'll have noticed no paranoia today despite a full sunny afternoon of kids swarming all over our front yard and so on, but, I'm slowly coming to terms with it, thank Hicks for that.