Following in my father’s footsteps, whose snoring was like a hog trying to swallow a suitcase, I’ve annoyed many with my savage sleeping sounds
THEY SAY A snorer is the only one unaffected by the racket; that is not strictly true. After years spent ruining the sleep of friends, lovers and strangers, a sophisticated snorer like me has an arsenal of management strategies to call upon, deploying them in troubled bedroom regions like special forces in times of national security crises.
All accounts of my snoring seem to describe my father’s technique – he appears to be the source. Its signatures are its wildness and unpredictability, its eccentric rhythms and crazed crescendos. Climactic moments are sometimes followed by unnerving stoppages – a characteristic of sleep apnoea, although I have never had this checked. People often report that its volume and savagery seem beyond the realm of humankind.
My snoring father sounded like a hog trying to swallow a suitcase.
Snoring is ideally performed in the arena of the one-night stand, and least suitably trumpeted in a hostel dormitory, where the worst sounds can inspire violence. If friends and lovers exhibit varying levels of tolerance towards this godless bellowing, strangers seem universally opposed to it. Strangers can get very indignant: “How dare you do this to me!” It is often forgotten that the snorer is also an innocent party, except for the fact that, fully aware of his special talent, he has chosen to spend the night sharing it with you.
A recent trip I took to Australia was, like a bucket of water over a slumbering drunk, suddenly, shockingly eye-opening about my snoring. It seems a ferocious noise erupted from my person both Down Under and under down.
After a few days in Melbourne I took an ostensibly harmless overnight ferry to Tasmania, a beautiful place renowned for its convict past and, more pertinently, their torture. The cabins were full aboard the Spirit of Tasmania, so I booked an “ocean recliner”. I took the usual precautions – refusing eye-contact with those near me, in case familiarity would embolden them to wake me up, and later making sure I was the last to turn in to give everyone a generous head-start.
The recliner was disastrously comfortable, but I buried my concerns in a blanket of relaxation, slipped on an airline mask and inserted earplugs – a snorer hates nothing more than being disturbed in the night, especially by snorers. I was deeply, madly contented. The Numskulls in charge of my snoring equipment concluded that a party had been organised.
Vague but insistent contact an unspecified time later by what appeared to be another living creature forced me to pull the mask from my eyes. An attractive blonde stood above me in a pose of pleading and hopefulness. “Please . . . please stop. None of us can sleep.” Half a dozen faces peered around from the darkness behind her and nodded.
The extent of my horror the next morning was proportional to the ambition of my snoring escapades around the world in the past. One time I woke in a Budapest hostel covered in knickers and bras that had been hurled at me by female room-mates. A gentle old man in a dorm in Sibiu, Romania, took himself off in the middle of the night to sleep in the bath. A tramp shuffled from a beautiful enclosed square in Barcelona at 6am one June day when I stopped for a nap and bounced a bittersweet symphony around its ancient walls.
Fortunately, my neighbours this morning aboard the Spirit of Tasmania were good-humoured and kind. “I don’t know what to say,” is all the smiling German girl who had woken me offered, shaking her head. A man across from her confirmed that something special had taken place.
I suppressed pride in my performance and chalked down the experience.
But four nights later, in a backpackers’ hostel in sleepy Bicheno on Tasmania’s east coast, the chickens came home not only to roost, but to sleep soundly when the roosting was done. The weather had turned cold so many campers had decided to get a bed for the night. I was told I’d be sharing a room with seven other guys. There was a whisper that one of them was US military. I had a terrible sense of foreboding.
Experienced snorers understand the importance of a hostel room’s dimensions – the bigger the room, the harder it is to identify the source, the more likely someone else will be blamed. Very dark rooms deliver the same benefit. The room in Bicheno was no bigger than a breakfast in America – four bunk beds were crammed together – but it was beautifully dark. I clung to that fact as I clambered into my bunk in this enclosure of silently sleeping males.
The first thump to the underside of my bed was delivered within the hour – the first hour is showtime for the heavy snorer. After that, the blows came regularly. It is stressful and exhausting to be woken so suddenly and often from such a deep sleep, so much so that, in a great enactment of irony, I became enraged at the culprit for ruining my night. But I knew that confronting him would give away my position and identity. “That’s what they want you to do,” I thought.
One mercy is that I never snore in the morning. And so, when the sun came up, and my room-mates lifted their eyes for someone to blame, I was sleeping sweetly. Small conversations had broken out in the kitchen by the time I awoke. “Thinks he’s the lion king,” spat one. Another thought the din had come from the berth beneath me. A third suggested the offender had fled the scene first light.
I moved outside and joined in the general expressions of disgust. This is the key moment: one person always knows it was you and you must identify them immediately and make them happy. The US marine was giving me cool looks. He was on an elaborate cycling trip, transporting his huge muscles around the island. “Sounds amazing!” I said.
