Suresh Menon: Caught napping

I have two sets of friends - those who don't call me in the afternoon because they think I might be taking a nap, and those who do for the same reason.

My napping is irregular and dependent upon a host of factors. Have I had a full meal with the balance tilted towards over-eating? Did I have a late night previously? Do I expect a late night to follow? Does it mean I don't have to meet and greet my wife's friends? Do I just want to have a nap without the pressure of finding a reason for it?

In the Greek pantheon, there is no one mythological being representing the afternoon nap. The Titans, who even had one - Epimetheus - for afterthoughts and excuses, were clearly folks for whom the siesta was yet to be invented. And no, the rumour that he slept just for four hours a day - the amount some of us sleep after lunch - is not the reason Bonaparte's father named his son NAPoleon.

The poet John Keats didn't think it worthwhile to write an ode to the afternoon nap, perhaps because a nightingale stalled his effort once, as he tells us in an ode to that bird, which begins:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,...

Non-nappers might have no idea what he is talking about, but those who like to doze off a bit to break up their day know he is describing the approach of drowsiness following a heavy meal.

That might be the most misunderstood poem in the English language; Keats' attempt at writing an ode to the nap is somehow being read as one to a bird that sings and keeps everybody up. That was a poem that was written in a couple of hours in the morning; had Keats written it at night we might have had an ode to an owl. Or even an ode to the public transport system outside every city-dweller's window.

I tend to doze off - let me admit this frankly with that honesty for which I am known from one end of my table to the other - while watching cricket matches in the afternoon.

A casual glance to see that everything is in order and then off I go with the words of an excited commentator ringing in my ears. When I wake up a couple of wickets have fallen and my efforts are then focused on finding out what has already happened rather than on what will happen.

Like Samuel Coleridge, I also sometimes get unwelcome interruptions from insurance agents. But I have left no poem unfinished. Or even started. Meanwhile, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...