I go to sleep

My most recent transatlantic journey has shown me that my body is certainly older than it has ever been. In some ways that's stating the obvious, but for the first time in over 10 years of transatlantic flights I found myself falling asleep very easily on the plane.

I remember my father's uncle whom we knew as iz-ziju Mabbli, saying (when he was in his late 80s) that the older you get the less sleep you need. I have always considered this to be something to look forward to as I got older, but somehow I'm discovering that this is possibly only true when you're an octogenarian and it doesn't necessarily apply when you're still getting older but at a relatively younger age.

Perhaps it's also because our lifestyles have changed considerably since the days when iz-ziju Mabbli professed the correlation between age and hours of sleep. He died over 20 years ago at a time when people in Malta still didn't fall asleep in front of the TV almost every night or fly round-trips across the Atlantic more than a dozen times in a decade as if they were just visiting another country in central Europe.

I'm not a sleepy person. I strongly believe that we build sleep debts when we sleep less than 8 hours every day. So I suppose this could explain my falling asleep on the plane instead of watching the in-flight movies as I've always done. Then again the movie I was watching on the flight this last trip was a real sleeper: De-lovely with Kevin Kline as the devine Cole Porter.