Mrs ST
I’d been with a girl for a few months, and we were asleep in bed. I’m a naturally heavy sleeper – hurricanes, cars crashing into the front wall a few feet from where I’m sleeping with the window open, foxes mating – You name it, I’ve slept through it.

Yet just a few months into a relationship with a girl, she woke up in the middle of the night, screaming and crying. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been startled awake by anything.

“Help, help. Babe, wake up!” she was shouting, simultaneously hitting me to wake me up. I shot up in bed, convinced that she was about to be raped or murdered.

“What? What’s the matter?” I asked, worriedly looking around the room and being unable to see the cause of her distress.

She continued to cry. “I’ve swallowed a carrier bag!” she wailed.

The incredulity of this hit me after a few seconds.

“What?”

“I’ve swallowed a carrier bag!” she repeated, rubbing her hands round her throat despite there being nothing there, no pieces of carrier bag on the bed, no distortion to her voice and – most importantly – no crinkly carrier-bag sound.

Still, love keeps you together and I’m pleased to say she is now Mrs SeasonTicketless. And she’s still weird and prone to waking me in the middle of the night to tell me about the monks that are surrounding the bed, or the ninja perched on the wardrobe.

It’s been almost seven years now, and yet I still refer to her as the mad one.
( SeasonTicketless is too often the statue, and rarely the pigeon., Sun 19 Nov 2006, 19:54, Reply)