Saga of the cock

“To sleep perchance to dream” – for me, in recent times, I would have been satisfied with “To sleep, perchance to sleep”.  Unlike some of my friends I can mostly get to sleep; the problem is then I re-awake prematurely with a mind full of stuff and at a different temperature to the one when I entered the land of nod.  Anyway, that is just background to a recent interrupted night of being horizontal, as when dozing off, a cockatoo made sure entry to sweet repose was temporarily barred.

There is a myriad of bird life in my neighbourhood and in the main I’m very neighbourly to these feathered friends.  I’ve learnt to recognize calls and plumage, as well as groupings.  I’ve made guesses at hierarchies and noted feeding patterns.  Seasonal fruit on trees has been left for anything with the ability to cling to a branch to help themselves to – no nets for me or ridiculous scarecrows.

But I do cross the line in the sand re. tolerance, as far screeching from a cockatoo at midnight is concerned.  While I lay awake and find these anomalous noises puzzling and muse at the avian motivation that underlies them, I feared they might go on for a significant period of time.  As it happened this instance of after-hours squawking must have worn Cockie out and it subsided, and apparently I fell asleep soon afterwards.

A very small number of hours later I awoke with a start.  Inside one of my nostrils – because of the tumult I can’t remember which one – I felt a strange feeling.  A tickling.  Like most tickling a faint pointed friction without decibels.  Quickly I was no longer supine, becoming in the blink of an eye, a fully participating biped again.  I turned on the bed light just in time to see a cockroach, not large but smallish, emerging from one of my nostrils.  Not being a flying insect it fell to the floor and scurried away as most of their brethren tend to do.  Foolishly it made a beeline, under a chest of drawers.  But there I’m almost sure it met its maker, gassed by liberal supplies of crawling insect killer, a brand Evonne Cawley once claimed in a TV ad “was kind to sensitive noses”.

Regaining whatever composure I could find, I blew my nose, resumed the attempt at shut eye, and wondered what motivates a cock roach to enter a nasal cavity.  As I lay down once more, my heart rate slowing and other metabolic processes hopefully moving into night time mode, I pondered the coincidence of the word ‘cock’ and how I had been kept awake and awoken by two creatures bearing this prefix.  A couple of days later, when rounding up a rooster and corralling him into his nocturnal hutch, I realized that in the past, I have been woken me up or kept me awake by two other types of cocks.