The writing cardigan and cape

 Insomnia rituals will vary from person to person but once you get good at not sleeping you’ll know all the things that help you.

Some people lie still and pretend they are asleep, others get up and make a milky drink and then go back to bed. There are whole armies of middle aged hormonal women reading or listening to the radio at 3am. I’m sure it’s not just women who are bad at sleeping but I’m fairly certain that hormones can make the land of Morpheus difficult to stay in.

Your Fitbit panics so much about your lack of sleep, it decides you must have had a kip when you took it off to have a bath and it just stops registering the three hours you did actually sleep at night because, well, that can’t be right, can it?  If this is you, then like me, you are probably a seasoned pro and you will have rituals that get you through the long, dark, cold hours before the birds start tweeting.

When I have failed at lying still, or reading under the covers and can tell that I’m disturbing the Long Suffering Husband , I get up and go downstairs and write. This is where the writing cardigan comes into its own.

My writing cardigan is long, brown and comforting. It’s got pockets, which are particularly important because when you write you need to stand up and walk around a bit to loosen the ideas or stop your bottom sticking to the chair and you need a pocket to stash your favourite pen in. There’s nothing worse than completing 10 laps of the living room, coming up with a brilliant idea and not being able to find the right pen because it’s slipped down the crack in the sofa. You can slip a writing cardigan on over any outfit: pyjamas, yoga clothes or even your everyday work clothes and suddenly you are transformed. No longer an insomniac or tired teacher but a woman in a writers cardigan with ideas and words at your fingertips. My writing cardigan is beginning to get a bit old and is starting to bobble and develop holes but I still love it.

It can be quite chilly at this time of the day. The heating hasn’t clicked on and so a little while ago I bought myself a fleecy blanket to stay in the living room. It matches my writer’s cardigan and sometimes I pop it over my knees, like an old granny. If it’s very chilly I might pull the blanket up to my neck or wrap it around my shoulders. This turns me from jaded woman, jabbing at a keyboard to superhero. I’m invincible. Now in my laps of the living room, I have a cape.  I swish up and down, collecting ideas and suddenly 3 am becomes 5am and there are 2000 new words flashing on my screen.

I have put ‘new writing cardigan’ on my Christmas list. I wonder if it will work as well if it isn’t brown and doesn’t match my cape.