The joys of couch-surfing

So for the past few months I've been couch-surfing, which is really just a fancy way of saying sleeping terribly.

After Jeremy and I got engaged, I gave up my room and decided it would be a good plan to sleep on various floors / sofa-beds / couches as a way to save money - to cushion the inevitable blow of months of unemployment once I move to the States and wait for Employment Authorisation and Advanced Parole and other such terms which make me feel like a criminal.

Little did I know that the USCIS (US citizen & immigration service) would take FOREVER to send one measly little email to say we were through the first stage and it was being sent to the next ... and that there would be a postal strike (see 'my love of the royal mail') that would delay everything by a decade (or 3 months) and so extend my couch-surfing / ill-sleeping by a million years (3 months).

So for the past million decades (3 months) I've been dividing my time between various benevolent friends and their altruistic couches. This has worked reasonably well - I generally have a talent for sleeping anywhere and I enjoy cooking for people, which tends to mean my benefactors don't hate me. Other than the odd stiff neck and under-eye shadows, I've been surfing the couches relatively unscathed.

Until Now.

Yesterday, my friend Helen informed me that she had awoken in horror to the sight of a...BED-BUG. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the horrors of bedbugs, no they are not the figment of a nursery rhyme, Bed-Bugs are the modern-day plague. Ok, they don't bring death, but they do bring full-on insanity-inducing paranoia and they are hugely upsetting. Of course I was very concerned for Helen, second only to my deep concern for myself. Because Helen's couch, is (was) my surfing-turf.

After trying unsuccessfully to feign deep concern for Helen (I'm pretty sure she knew I was mostly concerned for me) , I came back to my current residence (my dad's flat in richmond - where I spend 40% of my time) and starting maniacally searching furniture / clothing / wall seams, cracks and crevices for lentil-shaped creatures. I didn't find any. But that didn't stop me playing a strange game with phantom bed-bugs in the middle of the night, which involved lying very still in the dark until I thought they might have let down their guard, before switching on the light and pulling back the covers to catch them in their carnivorousness. There still weren't any. But that didn't stop me going on to dream about them.

Helen, who actually does have bed-bugs (rather than my imagined ones) behaved much more sensibly. She took a sleeping pill, had rent-a-kill around in the morning and has taken steps to sorting the problem (which wasn't that serious in the first place). Ah to be that pragmatic.