nighttime nostalgia

Now Playing: 5 Years Time by Noah & The Whale (wherever you go there'll be love, love, love)

Do you ever get those odd flashbacks to those random moments in your childhood?

In the house that I grew up in, in the southern suburbs of Perth - it's now been pulled down - my sister and I shared an enormous bedroom - she moved out when she was about ten and  I got too annoying. The entire bedroom was filled up with two king single beds pushed together.

My sister had asthma so my mum bought a little peach-scented oil lamp which burned on a chair at the foot of our bed. I remember mum being very paranoid about the lamp and constantly coming to check that it hadn't spilled over and we weren't dying in an inferno.

I still remember the smell of that lamp. To this day I haven't seen anything quite as comforting as the warm glow of that lamp in the middle of the night. I used to flip over and put my head at the foot of my bed and just stare at it until the flickering light lulled me into sleep.

Later, when my sister moved into her own room and I had that huge room to myself, I used to stay up all night staring out the window, breathing in the night air and watching the cars speed past. I would sit up and wrap my quilt around me in a warm cuddly cocoon, just thinking, until I was so exhausted I keeled over sideways unconscious.

I was lying in bed last night with tears streaming down my cheeks - a normal thing when I'm overtired, as I explained on my poetry page. I thought back on all the things I used to do after lights out - reading with a torch, wandering around the house, getting up and lying on the floorboards...and I realized that I'd always rebelled against sleep. And sometimes, when I am too tired to sleep, I just have to think of the heady scent of that oil lamp of my childhood and it comforts me to sleep like a lullaby.