Mornings are rubbish.
During my second year at university, I became largely nocturnal. Naturally this was a bad thing in terms of attending lectures, handing in essays etc, so one day I decided it had to stop. I went to bed early and set my alarm for 4am, intending to finish off some coursework, have a healthy breakfast (toast and Nutella, like every other meal that week) and then toddle in for my 9am lecture.

The alarm went off promptly at 4am. I shot upright in pitch darkness having had a good three quarters of an hour of sleep and, somewhat disoriented, headed for the bathroom. A few minutes later I got up again, this time from the floor, with a pounding headache.

"Oh great, another rainy day," I muttered to myself, hearing the tell-tale pitter-patter of precipitation, as I stumbled into the hallway and thence to the bathroom. "Odd that it's no quieter further from the window though." Still bleary-eyed and blinking I had the traditional just-woken up slash and then turned to the sink for hand-washing and teeth-brushing, only to discover that half my face and most of my chest was now startlingly red, and that I appeared to be leaking at a frankly startling rate. Obviously the only reasonable course of action would be to clean myself up with someone else's flannel and then make myself a kind of toilet-roll turban and go back to bed.

At about a quarter past eight, my long suffering housemate knocked on my door to ask if I was coming to lectures, a thankless task if ever there was one. "Guh!" I announced, and sat up in bed. Owing to my poor toilet-roll-turban-constructing skills my pillow came with me, before peeling off and falling to the floor, accompanied by unpleasant sound effects and renewed bleeding. I the harsh light of day my room looked like an abbatoir, and my housemate strongly recommended that I get myself to a doctor.

I finally turned up to university at about a quarter past five with a huge wad of gauze taped to my head, after a day-long odyssey of GPs, buses and hospitals. My head had been superglued back together, I had a fantastic excuse for not having done my essay and, I later found out, my injured appearance made quite an impression on the young lady who would eventually take my cherry.

That evening, I applied CSI-esque levels of forensic examination to figure out what had actually happened. I concluded that I must have been so surprised at successfully getting up at 4am that I immediately collapsed in shock, unfortunately landing eyebrow-first on the corner of my radiator. This led me to conclude that getting up in the morning would likely be extremely hazardous to my health, and as a result I got to do my second year again, thus gaining a free bonus year of studenthood. Hurrah!
(wellgroomedwookiee is a filthy-minded hobgoblin, Fri 8 Aug 2008, 16:05, Reply)