Why your 40 winks are a blight on my peace and quiet

People come and stay at this time of year. Houseguests we’ll call them, though mine are better described as lazy bastards who’ve mistaken me for a valet. They all enjoy napping. Over the holiday season the nap becomes a rite and a right. Some of them drink at lunchtime, while others are tired out by their own crucial, unique contribution to world affairs.

Always surprising to me that people should be exhausted by being total nobodies, but my houseguests are. They swoop for my sofas and chaise longues and curl up and say, “I’m just going to close my eyes for five minutes”. But it’s never five minutes. It’s an announcement that a room, verandah, courtyard or deck is being commandeered indefinitely by a comatose holidaymaker in pineapple print shorts.

At this time of year any shared room in my house might harbour some goofball wallowing in annual leave and napping as agreeably as a tipsy centenarian. And rousing these nappers is like stepping on a king brown – they come up with their yellow fangs bared, full of the kind of reptilian animosity that Morpheus holds for the waking world.

“What do you want?” a son-in-law who’s repurposed my living room for a hermit’s slumber party will ask me, while blinking angrily at me from my sofa at noon. It’s as if he’s caught me creeping up on him to take a snap of his latest tattoo to send to other old blokes who’ve fallen off the edge of the zeitgeist.

In my sitting room a brother-in-law is dozing, a silhouette of Uluru on the hearthrug, with his eyelids twitching like sparrows’ eggs frying on a skillet. He told me he was going in there to do his calisthenics, but they have morphed, rapidly, into a nap. What is the singular for calisthenics? You’d think the singular wouldn’t be needed. After all, who does a single sit-up? But he performs a calisthenic as a gateway to sleep.

And I can tell by his twitchy eyelids he is dreaming of Dana Simpson’s bare breasts walking towards him on the Portsea Back Beach circa 1975. It is his brief, daily nirvana, and who’s to say it’s wrong?

Rousing these nappers is like stepping on a king brown – they come up with their yellow fangs bared.

I creep softly through the room, knowing if I wake him, I’ll be responsible for Dana’s breasts plummeting from his remembered vision of their uttermost perkiness to the reality of their flaccid dotage and he will hate me for this the way we all hate those who’ve stolen our youth and dreams.

Look, I like a nap myself, and feel my brain reinvigorated by a 10-minute submersion in shallow torpor. But it must be shallow. Never lie down. The whole thing should take no more than 15 minutes from the moment your arse hits the recliner to the moment you snap your eyes awake in confusion as to your whereabouts, the time of day, and your complicity in a gorgonzola heist.