Goodnight, Sweet King

DK and I saw our first “noise machine” years ago in Weston, Connecticut. Friends had just had central air conditioning installed, which they loved, but at night found they missed the sound of the big noisy air conditioner they’d had in the bedroom window. Sort of for a lark they bought something they’d seen at Brookstone, originally a mail-order company started in 1965 for Hard-to-Find-Tools but which had now moved on to cool-gadgety-type things you didn’t know you needed like foot spas or a radio that works in the shower or, in this case, Tranquil Moments, a little machine that recreated the “white noise” of air conditioners. To their surprise, it worked.

Both DK and I said what a dumb idea but they insisted we try it, so we did and, that night, we lay in their guest room chuckling and shaking our heads saying Hah! Who could ever sleep with this racket and that’s the last we remember.

We immediately bought our own noise machine. It was a small gadget, about the size of 4 slices of bread, and portable, so you could take it with you when you traveled, and it wasn’t just “white noise”, you had six choices of “soothing” sounds to lull you off to sleep. Gentle Rain, Ocean Surf, Summer Nights. Can’t remember the others. We went with Gentle Rain. Okay, yes, this is England, and I could just open the window but this was more fun. There was a volume control on it as well and a timer you could set for 90, 60, or 30 minutes and the sound would gradually diminish before the thing switched itself off, by which time you’d be asleep. And if you woke up in the middle of the night you just hit the ON button again and off you’d drift.

DK and I kept our machine up on the headboard so we could both reach it easily and, in time, I even learned to hang onto it with one hand while I re-set it with the other so as not to send it sailing down onto his head.

Over the years we gave out seven or eight Tranquil Moments as gifts. We may even have become boring about it. An osteopath friend got one which she used for room ambiance, another was to hopefully help a friend through chemo, and when a new “travel version” came out—even smaller and lighter, much excitement—we gave one to the famous intrepid globe-trotter and sleeper-in-strange-places Michael Palin for his birthday.

And this new travel version had nineteen sounds (!), the original six plus some weird ones that didn’t interest me, in fact might just keep me awake, like Tropical Storm (too Somerset Maugham) or Night Train (shades of that room-shaking scene in My Cousin Vinny) or North Woods (you’d worry about bears, no?) and Bonfire, which would have had me leaping for 911 and the fire extinguisher. It had a two-time-zone clock display too, useful, and an alarm. You could also record a personal message on it such as “DARLING YOU’RE SNORING! TURN OVER!” which played over and over until, say, the snorer turned over, or you threw the machine at him. Both original and travel versions ran on AA batteries or plugged in with adaptors. Brookstone doesn’t do them anymore, I just looked, but you can still find some on eBay.

But you don’t need one. Because now you have apps! And you can get all the noise you want right on your iphone. I have something installed called Quick Sleep but Den couldn’t get it on his for some reason, which meant I was in charge. Not that I’m not anyway.

Quick Sleep, unlike Tranquil Moments, offers you 96 different sounds. You can spend all day choosing your sound for later. As well as your basic boring old Rain or Waves you can have Rain Shower, Fountain, Fish Splash, Gale, Thunderstorm, Ocean Storm, Endless Ocean, Beach, there’s lots of water related ones. Or geographical ie Mountain. Desert. Forest. Cave. Not sure who goes for those, or for Cuckoo or Loons On Lake. Crows. Owl. Sparrow. Lots of different birds. Insects. Cicadas. Sheep, Ducks. Jungle Frogs. Moving on to vehicles, with Train, Ferryboat, Sailboat. San Fransicso Cable Car. Then a slew of airy-fairy stuff like Celtic Lullaby, Hare Krishna or Monastery.

Anyhow, you pick what you want, you can have each one singly or combine them. I mix Gentle Rain and Fountain, that’s it. That’s what we like. But of course, if Den’s snoring, and won’t shut up, that’s another story, I storm off to my office and leave him with Cat Purring, volume UP, or Footsteps, but sometimes Horse Walk, Times Square or, the special treat, Cuckoo. Heather, Lady Ayckbourn, once told me that all she had to do to stop Alan’s snores was to reach over and gently touch his cheek with her finger and he’d stop instantly. I tried it with DK, got no response, so went back to shoving.

And all went well on the Quiet Sleep Front for years.

Then DK started going a bit deaf, which sadly coincided with him updating his phone, which allowed him, with our friend Barbara’s help, to not only change his Apple ID to one that actually worked, which in turn allowed him, again with her help, to upload his own Sleep Sounds app. I used to like Barbara, a lot.

So now, from my side of the room we have, as already mentioned, a perfectly acceptable indeed enjoyable Gentle Rain and Fountain mix at normal volume—and from Den’s side, emanating from some new and hard-to-navigate app, Light Rain it says but doesn’t sound so light to me, I would have called it Typhoon Hitting Metal Roof, in fact do, plus he has it so loud you can hear it from the driveway, meaning what I have to do now is lie there and cover my ears and wait for DK to fall asleep, then crawl around the floor to his side of the bed, grope along the skirting board for his phone, lower the volume on the sucker and jam a pillow onto it.

“Did you just turn that down?” I hear, halfway back.