A few things on my mind

A lot goes through your mind as you struggle to sleep, like this cough has done to me.

Any of this sound familiar?

1. Going to sleep by the sound of a CD. Wake up after a couple of hours. But it's still playing, and it only lasts an hour. Check clock. It's only been 10 minutes.

2. You sleep fitfully, waking every 10 to 20 minutes. FInally, it's less than an hour till you have to get up. You fall into a deep sleep and the wake only when th alarm goes off.

3. You toss and turn, so hot that there are barely 2 square inches of duvet left dry. You turn the duvet round 90 degrees to find some more dry bits. You drop off to sleep. When you awake 5 minutes later, you appear to have soaked a further 4 feet of quilt. Don't even think about the pillow.

4. This is the doozy. You wake at 4.04am to the sound of an approaching - something. Is it a faltering plane? A VERY early train? Aha! It arrives almost overhead and declares itself to be a helicopter. It's a few hundred yards away (probably - difficult to tell in the dark) and very high up, so it looks like a giant star, except for the green and red flashing lights. Now you are awake, you decide to have a pee. When you come back, it will be gone. But it doesn't go for more than half an hour. By which time you are tired of trying to use it to mask your breathing on account of this is FAR more intrusive than creaky lungs.

Who'd be sick? Who'd live in London, where noise abatement prevents us being disturbed by night flights, but allows the police to terrorise us with this torture.

Still on the topic of our wonderful police, what a week they've had.

- Praised for successfully prosecuting teenage killer of a 10-year-old boy.
- Castigated for a former successful prosecution of a woman who was said to have slammed a baby's head into a banister rail. She has been released after a retrial.
- Castigated for focusing on one suspect, and trying to honey-trap him, keeping him on remand for 13 months, ruining his life, while the real murderer (of a young mother in a public place in front of her baby son) went on to kill another mother, and this time her child too. He'd been reported by various people since before the first murder, including by his mother, and failed to turn up for 2 DNA tests, but the police suspected nothing.

- Then, the Piece de Resistance. A coroner tells the inquest jury they cannot find "unlawful killing" against the police who shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on a London Underground train. The jury did what they could. But no-one will pay.

So our wonderful police can kill with impunity, but cannot catch a killer even when someone points him out.

Can you imagine if they were all armed all the time?