Sound Slumber

The weather in London these days is cloudy but one has to switch on AC when he or she goes to bed. The other day while I was walking to the Business Centre, Sonja Assenheimer, Guest Relations Supervisor, Mandarin Oriental Hotel - London greeted me saying 'good morning' as usual . But when she asked me if I had slept well, I took it in the negative sense presuming that she had noticed something indicating a sleepless night on my face . It was when I read the article " Suite dreams" by Bob Greene in the International Herald Tribune that I realized that her question was quite natural . A Suite in a hotel is a luxury accommodation comprising a bedroom plus a living room and some times kitchen depending upon the type of the suite. It is pronounced as Sweet and therefore it goes hand in hand with the word dreams and the reader can will have no problem in understanding what the writer means in both ways . Such a group of words spelt or pronounced the same but have different meaning is called homonym.

What Bob Greene tries to pinpoint in his article is that whereas at one time a business traveller checking into a hotel was seeking various types of pomp and pleasures, " now a days the universal craving that hotels seek to satisfy is a night of true deep shuteye with no distractions". He adds that in 2008, 56 Million sleeping prescriptions were written and that doctors say they are dealing with 80 separate sleep disorders . The writer believes that something seems to have gone wrong and concludes that " what we need in these nerve jaggling times is a night of sound slumber".

Years ago during my college days, one of my friends had easily discovered how somnolent I was and wrote in my autograph " Sound sleep is the cheapest pleasure one can afford, so sleep Mohamed go on sleeping." Once when I wrote one of my close friends that my main business was sleeping, he said his wife burst into laughter.

Here in London what my room mate Dr. Ibrahim and myself do when we wake up from sleep is to check the time shown in the clock beside our beds to see whether we have had a jet lag as we know that our body clock will be out of sychronisation and the body takes time to adjust itself to the new time zones.

By the father