The girl I buy my coffee from told me today is going to be the coldest day this winter. 'It's snowing in the Dandenongs,' she explains. 'They reckon it'll hail tonight.'

That makes sense, I say by way of reply, and scrape the sole of my right shoe against the inside of my left ankle.

I couldn't sleep last night. There must be people out there who get polite forms of insomnia, a genteel wakefulness that gives you eight extra hours to read or click through the internet or play X-Box. That's not me. I work myself into a silent panic, stare at the ceiling, decide it's both too difficult to get up and too depressing to stay in bed.

Lately I've been sleeping well, but last night, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I knew that I wouldn't be. As soon as I got in bed I felt a slimy, creeping kind of panic, but it was too cold to get up so I thought I'd curl up, stay warm and wait it out. But I couldn't. After a while I crept out of bed to find my emergency stash of Xanax, which usually knocks me out, but last night was one of those nights where it just didn't, where my body became pleasantly heavy and relaxed but my head kept going and going and going. That's when my ankles started itching.

In my half-asleep, half-awake state all I really knew was scratching my ankle felt good, better than anything, better than sex or a truly powerful sneeze or even Shanghai Dumpling. So I scratched and scratched, and then my other ankle began itching, so I scratched that, and it became a frenzy of scratching, an unrestrained, onanistic orgy from my knees down. I may have even let out a moan of pleasure. Eventually I fell, quite unaware, into sleep. When I reluctantly woke up, to grey skies and heavy rain, the covers angrily twisted, my ankles were red-raw and swollen. I must have kept on scratching, even in my sleep.

So today I have itchy ankles, unwashed hair, wet, cold, feet, and it's going to hail. My head feels somehow padded, as though there are wads of cotton in my ears. I watch the rain come in on the BOM radar, drifting islands of blue and green. Time to hunker down, settle in, eat fruit toast, read things I don't have to. Time to turn the phone off and quit checking my email over and over and over. Time to go to bed.