Orna Mulcahy on people we all know
The only thing standing between Gerard and runaway success in his business is a good night's sleep. He has tried everything - hot baths, lavender pillows, a canter around the block before bedtime - but nothing works. If anything, the bath makes things worse, because he uses bathtime to read Business Plus magazine, and the combination of new gizmos one should have in the office plus the profiles of well-known thickos getting millions for their businesses is enough to fire him up and depress him at the same time. Gerard used to think that his best ideas came in the middle of the night, but he's given up keeping the pad and pencil beside the bed, having woken up once too often to find that his breakthrough concept is absolute tripe.
Gilly begs him not to work himself into such a lather before bedtime, and has bought him several mind-emptying meditation books, but instead, he seems to prefer having an appalling night's sleep that he can talk about the next morning. Sometimes Gilly will say she distinctly heard him snoring at 2am, 3am and 4am, but he very much doubts it, as Gilly is never, ever awake during the night when he needs her most. There he might be, sitting bolt upright, wondering if the family will survive global warming, while there she is, flat out, making that annoying whistling sound through her teeth.
Nothing keeps Gilly awake. He has tried planting all kinds of worrying thoughts in her mind as the lights go out - "Do you realise your tax disc is three months out of date?" or "Have you seen that envelope with the Manchester United tickets that you bought at the charity auction? They must be almost out of date by now" - but it doesn't work. Two minutes later she is dead to the world, leaving Gerard to prowl through the piles of post that have drifted into corners of the house, looking for the tax disc and the tickets. Next thing he has everything out on the kitchen table, along with a bowl of cereal, and by 2am their financial affairs are in order - or as much as they can be when you live with someone who spends half her life in Rococo.
When Gilly comes down to breakfast she finds the table already laid and a copy of the Visa bill on her plate, with circles and exclamation marks all the way down and a Post-it saying Can You Please Deal With This? "Please don't spoil breakfast," she says. "Fine, but you ruined my night, worrying about your tax disc, which thank God I found in the end."
Gilly thinks it's all very well for Gerard to go ruining his own night's sleep, but it really annoys her when he ruins other people's dinner parties by nodding off during the main course or, worse, wandering off to the toilet and crashing out on a sofa he meets along the way.