Nightime…..

….1.00am and I’m lying awake, silently cursing the aching in my knees and shoulders that are keeping me from sleep.
Voices outide, laughter, hooting calls. John and Pauline having another party? No – they’re too considerate to let guests make such a noise outsde at this time of night. B snores on beside me.
Icautiously get out o be, grab a dressing gown, tiptoe downstairs in the dark.
Once there, I get the dressing-gown on – not an easy task these days, with my tendonitis (or adhesive capsulitis, or frozen shoulder, or whatever it’s called). I first have to drape the thing over my head like a blanket, push my arms forward into the sleeves then wriggle, shrug and pull the garment down. This takes a good minute or more; I then discover that the belt has come out of the loops. Unable to reach behind to loop the belt around me, I have to take the dressing gown off, loop the belt through, then repeat the “prisoner being taken into court” performance.
Eventually, I am decently dressed enough to go outside. The night is dark – cloudly and with the Moon hiding beneath the horizon. But there seems to be a good amount of ambient light. The summer nightime twlight is evidently not yet over and my eyes quickly switch to night vision; I begin my patrol around the houses. They’re all dark. Even Son’s lights are off. Only the blinking light atop the satellite broadband receiving mast lets me know that we aren’t having one of the usual power cuts
The laughter, having stopped for a time, suddenly bursts forth again for a few moments. It’s not coming from close, but somewhere over to the south. Impossible to tell the distance – sound travels far at night in the country. It sounds like two, three people at most.
Teenagers playing ghosthunters and scaring themselves silly around the Castle? But I can’t see any flashes of torchlight. So they must be down the road, out of sight, somewhere by the fish farm. Somebody going way from the village, then, after a party or late lock-in. Visitors, not locals. Nobody living up here, away from the village, makes that kind of noise this late (anybody who regularly did would eventually get grief from the local poacher for scaring away the deer). So, somebody staying up at one of the houses up the road, or renting the holiday let past the fishfarm,or fishermen camping by the loch.
I think all this as I walk around. Maybe, I think, I could walk along the road a bit and see who it was – they wouldn’t see me in the dark, would they? It would be fun to be invisible, slipping through the dark, a shadow….
But then, I realise. I’m wearing a white dressing gown, my skin is pale, my hair is light-coloured. To anybody with night-eyes, I’m perfectly visible. And, though I’m barefoot and trying to tread softly, the noise of the gravel underfoot echos around the houses.
There could be anybody, somebody out there, somebody who is invisible watching me. Right now.
I hurry back indoors. I sit and read a book until it’s time to take a painkiller, then back to bed….
Eventually, I sleep.