Cheaper than Drugs.

I know a man who denies that jet lag exists. He regularly flies halfway across the world, marches off the plane after a 27 hour flight, goes straight into the Singapore office, pausing only to brush his teeth and immediately starts barking orders and making people redundant.

(Or whatever super-macho, no-human-weakness job it is he does!)

I want to sure this man. As far as I'm concerned denying jet lag is like denying the earth is round! I am so prone to jet-lag that I even get it when I haven't been on a plane: I get jet lag when the clock goes back.

(It's because I'm so in thrall to sleep. I'm grad if I get my habitual 16 hours a night, but if anything happens to interfere with that, I'm all over the place.)

Naturally, I've investigated all the jet-lag 'cures': drink plenty of water; eat lightly; do a littel excercise; get onto the bloody local time patterns immediately; and most importantly, walk around in the sunlight as soon as you arrive at your faraway destination.

All nonsense, of course. As effective as giving a Barbie plaster for a mug shattered to smithereens. I must admit I don't trust 'natural' solutions to conditions, I like chemicals. I am probablythe last person in the Asian world who doesn't have a homeopath & who stills swears by antibiotics.

I would love it if somenoe invented an anti-jet-lag drug & I couldn't care less about side effects, in fact I'd embrace them. Dry mouth? Trembling? Blurred Vision? Better then being fucking jet-lagged & falling asleep face downwards in my dinner at 8 at night. But unfortunately, for some things there is no cure but time. Like a hangover of a broken heart, you just have to wait your jet lag out & try to live through it as best as you can.

So what do you do when you're in your hotel room, it's pitch-black, a deep blanket of sleep has settled on whatever strange city you're in, and suddenly, you're wide awake. You're super awake, you've never been this awake in your life.

And you're so hungry. Savagely so. Your poor stomach is still on home time; it has to miss its breakfast and it's not pleased that someone wants to deprive it of it's lunch as well. But deep in the bowels of the silent, sleeping hotel, the room-service lads have shut the kitchen and gone home and it's long, long wait until morning.

What choice do you have but to shine the luminious light of the mini-bar into the darkened room & select an over-priced, supersized (when you're hungry, your percieve it as supersized, when you're not, think of it more as average.) bag of M&Ms and clamber back into bed to eat yourself back to sleep.

See? Not all the bad, right?