I suspect that today I'm going to be even sleepier than usual for a Monday.

At about 6am my smoke alarm went off. Not in an isolated-blip ‘my battery is running low’ sort of way, but in a full-on BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP ‘get your carcass out of bed and look for the fire’ sort of way. So I did so, with something approaching alacrity, and could find nothing in the flat that was either on fire or imminently about to be. (Except the gas flame in the boiler, which was entirely under control, as I checked by turning it off and on twice.)

A difficult dilemma about whether to wake up beckyc and see whether anything in her flat was on fire was resolved when I found she was already awake, so I got her to come upstairs and see if she could smell any smoke. (One of the rare occasions when my lack of sense of smell has made me feel seriously disadvantaged; if something had been smouldering, I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint it for myself.) Nothing; so I went back to bed, still a little uneasy but at least feeling that if I did burn to death in the next half hour I'd be able to look back from the afterlife and say I'd done my best.

Half an hour later, the smoke alarm went off again. That's the trouble with not finding any cause the first time: you may have assured yourself you aren't going to burn to death, but you haven't solved the immediate problem of a loud smoke alarm keeping you awake… So I've changed the battery, on general principles, and if that doesn't hold it I suppose it's new-smoke-alarm time. Bah. Final score: I'm down two hours of sleep and the price of the drink I owe Becky, and I still have to come in to work and at least try to behave as if I'm awake.

Sometimes technology just annoys me.