“My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. ― Bill Bryson, quote from In a Sunburned Country Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown.

And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. Whatever is inside-tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air-decides to leak out. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner my knuckles brush the floor. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant.

Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket I look as if I could do with medical attention. “I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper.

Under a sunburned country