One of the side-effects of my traipsing up and down anonymous estates in middle-income Coventry was that I got to breath in a lot of cold but fresh air (well almost fresh).

This resulted this week, in the deepest sleep I’ve had in ages. Now I’m not someone who has problems sleeping anyway, infact quite the opposite — sleeping is amongst some of my favourite activities whilst in a horizontal position and indeed the one I’m most successful at on a regular basis. So it came as a bit of a shock to me, on Thursday after my first full day out on the streets, to find myself asleep on my nose.

Even more shocking was that it occured whilst I was wrapping myself up in swathes of nostalgic anoraks during Ch4’s ‘Top Ten Sci Fi’ programme. The venerable Tom Baker was waxing lyrical about ‘Space 1999’, ‘Saphire & Steel’ and other equally fantasic rubbish from my childhood. So, given my predeliction for all things nerdish I should not only have been awake till the end but should have been recording it on VHS for later transfer to DVD, which I would have buried in a Titanium container along with a DVD Player, which would then be burried at the bottom of the garden with a ‘Do Not Open till the very Far Far Future Mr Martian Paleantologist’ sticker written on it … in binary code. But as I said, I fell asleep on my nose.

Maybe to keep awake I should have been reflecting upon the 15 doorslams I’d received during that day, or the 20 no answers or the 14 refusals to pledge? Perhaps even upon the 3 remarkable individuals who decided that they would donate money to a charity they’d never heard of via a direct debit mandate which required them to give out their account details to a slightly nervous bloke who came knocking on their door. I mean, would you? I know I wouldn’t — well I suppose I wouldn’t have in the past but now I might be willing to listen at least. What struck me as poignant was that two of them were care workers of some kind – one a security guard at a hospital and another a Fillipino ‘guest worker’ nurse. Neither had BMW’s parked outside their homes if you know what I mean. I wonder whether through me, the charity was exploiting so called ‘soft touches’ or is there a rare type of person who just cares and gives when the opportunity arises. I think my cynicism is undergoing some sort of transformation. As indeed is my nose.