As I grow older, I become more and more like the Leaning Tower of Piza, although in my case the curvature of the spine is the result of constantly stretching to pick up my Thesaurus, as valuable to me as a bottle of water in a drought! From that has come the phrase: ‘Going to bed with a dictionary’ 

To my my mind this immediately conjures an obscure radio interview or perhaps Desert Island Discs, in which some celebrity or egg-head of sparkling wit and inexhaustible vocabulary also admits to reading several daily newspapers and a least one obscure novel, translated from the Russian, a month.

In my case, however, the term, ‘going to bed with a dictionary’ means something quite different. 

My computer is upstairs in my bedroom and often, in a spirit of laziness I leave my bed unmade, pulling the covers over when I go to bed that night. In the middle of the night, I stretch out my hand and encounter something with spiky pages, hard and unyielding … my dictionary that I have forgotten to put away. (Indeed, I might as well as said, a thesaurus except this sounds more like some prehistoric animal.)

Not exactly the answer to my dreams. 

Visit my website Barbara Spencer.

Check out my facebook page Barbara Spencer on Facebook.