One problem with running a Wine Bar is the very real opportunity one has to take advantage of the goods.
I particularly liked the different Beaujolais and the distinctive deep and flavoursome Riojas. Totally unlike the modern ones, I'm sorry to say.
Though I could, and would, not drink to excess, by the time I had closed the bar and gone home and had de-stressed over a glass or two I had had enough red wine. So by the time I got to bed my normally quite gentle snorette would have become, shall we say, considerably louder.
Claudette suggested that I should go to the doctor and do something about it. I did and he arranged an appointment for me at London's Kings Cross sleep center.
Ahh, Kings Cross. Trains and dames.
So on the appointed date I turned up at the center, nice and early, at around 7.00 pm. and they told me to go away. Come back when you've drunk your 'normal' amount. So I drove back across town to the Bar at Battersea, served the customers, had a laugh and a glass or two and represented myself at the sleep clinic at around 11.00 p.m.
They showed me to my bedroom where I undressed and got into bed.
A nice nurse entered. She was pretty, young and attentive.
"I shall be sleeping with you tonight. I need to judge the level of your snoring."
She connected a series of electrodes to different parts of my body. Leads led to an impressive bit of kit called, she told me, a polysomnograph.
I asked, "What does that do?"
"It measures your breathing rate, the stages of sleep you experience, the amount of oxygen in your blood, your heart rate and your blood pressure."
She then placed a small sensor on my finger.
"And what's that for?"
"That's an oximeter. That sends out pulses of light. It's attached to that computer over there that studies how these pulses are absorbed by your blood so that the computer can measure the amount of oxygen there is in your blood at any one time."
"Very impressive."
It was warm and peaceful in that bedroom and I felt safe knowing she was close. I closed my eyes and slept like a lamb.
She came in at seven the next morning to wake me. She held a cup of tea. What was strange about this was that the liquid was rippling. So great was it that it almost slopped over the teacup. She was shaking, looked shaken and also ashen and slightly distraught.
"Was I that bad?"
"I have never heard anything like it ever. It was terrible. Utterly, utterly terrible," she said.
Then. "Promise me. Promise me. "
"What?"
"That you will never, ever sleep with your mistress."
Excellent advice. And I kept my word. I never did.
